This is a gripping memoir, and often a very upsetting one. The author spent her entire childhood and youth during Mao's reign before moving to Britain in her late 20s. Her father, a rigidly idealistic Party member, reached a high position in the Party before his commitment to fairness led to more and more brutal denunciations. Chang uses incidents in her family's lives to show changing attitudes toward Communism, the way information and propaganda filtered through a vast mostly rural country, and how Mao gradually harnessed local, personal spites in the service of repression.

That makes it sound more boring than it is, because the family stories are all fascinating too, individually and as part of a longer story. But it's the way they connect to the political narrative (and sometimes cause you to shudder about how easily things can go badly wrong through government mismanagement) that raises it above "good story" status.