Available Formats
Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself and China
By (Author) Jung Chang
HarperCollins Publishers
William Collins
28th January 2026
16th September 2025
United Kingdom
General
Non Fiction
Political oppression and persecution
Political control and freedoms
Hardback
336
Width 159mm, Height 240mm, Spine 24mm
270g
THE LONG-AWAITED SEQUEL TO WILD SWANS, THE MULTI-MILLION COPY INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLING SENSATION
Jung Changs Wild Swans was a book that defined a generation, an epic personal history of Jung, her mother and grandmother three daughters of China. The book opens in 1909 with her grandmothers birth and foot-binding when China was under the last emperor, moving through Mao Zedongs rule, especially the Cultural Revolution during which Jungs parents were subjected to horrendous ordeals because of their courage. It finishes in 1978 when Deng Xiaoping officially ended the Mao era and started the reforms. Jung, at that propitious juncture, became one of the first Chinese to leave Communist China for the West.
Nearly half a century on, China has risen from a decrepit and isolated state to a global power, the challenger to the United States dominant position in the world. Through those decades, Jungs life has been intimately entwined with her native land. Her experiences dealing with the regime in those years were rich and revealing especially so because all her books were (and are) banned.
Fly, Wild Swans is the follow-up to Wild Swans and brings the story of Jungs family along with that of China up to date. The book is in many ways Jungs love letter to her mother. It is inevitably also about her grandmother and father, both of whom died tragically in the Cultural Revolution but are often recalled in this book. In fact, the past is never far away in Jungs subsequent life. It has shaped her, and moulded the present China, and whats more, it promises to herald the future.
China is now at another watershed moment with the era of Chairman Xi Jinping greatly affecting the lives of Jung and her mother. Fly, Wild Swans is Jungs heartfelt response to that experience, and a book filled with drama, love, curiosity and incredible history both personal and global. Ultimately uplifting, told in Jungs clear, honest and compelling voice, it is memoir writing at its best.
'Painful. Astonishing. Honest. Profoundly revealing as a portrait both of a family and of the deeper traumas that lie at the heart of modern China'
Rory Stewart
Fly, Wild Swans is another wonder book from Jung Chang. Elegiac and beautifully written, it brings her story and that of China up to date whilst giving an unforgettable account of what it is like to live in a communist dictatorship one that forbids a daughter to visit her mothers deathbed. It is a book about love, family and the terrible price paid by them all in the face of Chinas cruel politics
Lady Antonia Fraser
Jung Changs powerful and profoundly moving sequel to Wild Swans has been well worth the wait. Her and her remarkable mothers story since the end of Wild Swans intertwines fascinatingly with that of national socialist modern China, with their love-filled human story threatened by hideous Communist oppression, all over again. Threatened, but because of their bravery and evident decency, never crushed
Andrew Roberts
Far more than a sequel, Fly Wild Swans is the elegiac account by Jung Chang of the literary life that made her famous and the price she has paid for being a loyal daughter. Passages of great beauty speak to her love of Chinese culture alongside unsparing descriptions of life under a cruel system. Her book takes the reader into the private worlds, the trade-offs and the dangers of proximity to power in modern China, showing us how much, and yet so little, has changed since the days when Jung Chang's family suffered during the rule of Chairman Mao. In the author's telling, fear has simply been modernised. It is a persuasive and compelling read
Michael Sheridan
Jung Chang was born in Yibin, Sichuan Province, China, in 1952. She was a red guard briefly at the age of fourteen and then worked as a peasant, a barefoot doctor, a steelworker, and an electrician before becoming an English language student and, later, an assistant lecturer at Sichuan University. She left China for Britain in 1978 and was subsequently awarded a scholarship by York University, where she obtained a PhD in linguistics in 1982 the first person from the Peoples Republic of China to receive a doctorate from a British university. She is the author of the best-selling Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, and, along with her husband Jon Halliday, of the biography, Mao: The Unknown Story. Her books have been translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than 15 million copies, in addition to millions in pirated editions and computer downloads in mainland China where both books are banned. Among the many awards she has won are the UK Writers Guild Best Non-Fiction (1992) and Book of the Year UK (1993). Her latest book Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China, was published in 2013.