The Sisters Mao – A Sunday Independent Book of the Year (Hardback)

Our summary description

As Independent Scottish booksellers, we write all of our descriptions personally, we hope you enjoy this one.

The Sisters Mao moves between two stages of unrest. In London, Iris and Eva rehearse a provocation of their own, plotting an intervention at a West End theatre where their mother is performing in Miss Julie. Their work with a radical performance collective blurs art and sabotage, family loyalty and revolt. In Beijing, Jiang Qing prepares a very different spectacle, refining a state ballet that will be used to consolidate power and erase rivals within the Party.

As these parallel preparations unfold, the novel draws the three women into a shared dramatic frame. Each is driven by conviction and desire, by love that edges into control, by the intoxicating pull of ideology. What links them is not geography but a belief in performance as a means of transformation, and a willingness to risk everything to be seen and heard.

The Sisters Mao is measured and unsettling, attentive to the private costs of public gestures. It suggests that history is shaped as much by intimate bonds as by grand political statements, and that the line between creation and destruction is often perilously thin.