Crystal Wedding

About

Yang Tianyi is brilliant and beautiful, but her marriage to Wang Lian is a quiet catastrophe. When she encounters her true love Hua Zheng at Tiananmen Square during the tumultuous spring of 1989, everything she has resigned herself to is upended. But Hua Zheng is falsely accused as a perpetrator of the disturbances and sentenced to prison, leaving Tianyi trapped between the life she endures and the one she was promised. Winner of the English PEN Translates Award, Xiaobin Xu's novel braids personal heartbreak with political upheaval in a story of searing emotional honesty. The intimate scale of one woman's choices becomes inseparable from the larger forces reshaping China. A love story that doubles as a portrait of a generation caught between obedience and desire — and the impossible cost of both.