The Flowers of War

About

December 1937. The Japanese have taken Nanjing. A group of schoolgirls hides in an American church compound, and thirteen-year-old Shujuan watches as the sanctuary fills with unexpected arrivals — wounded soldiers, desperate civilians, and a group of prostitutes from the city's pleasure quarter who will make a sacrifice that complicates every assumption about virtue and courage. Yan Geling writes the Nanjing Massacre not as historical panorama but through the eyes of a child who cannot fully process what she sees — which makes the reader's understanding all the more devastating. The novel is restrained where it could be graphic, and the moral center belongs to the women everyone had written off. A war novel that finds its heroism in the last place anyone expected to look.