Daughters of the Bamboo Grove
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€17.50
A01=Barbara Demick
adoption
Author_Barbara Demick
Category=DNB
Category=NHF
china
david grann
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
free lea ypi
jung chang
lisa taddeo
lost twin book
one child policy
private revolutions yuan yang
red memory tania branigan
separated twins
tara westover
Product details
- ISBN 9781783787258
- Dimensions: 129 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 26 Mar 2026
- Publisher: Granta Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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In 2000, a Chinese woman gave birth to twins in a bamboo grove, trying to avoid detection by the government because she already had two daughters. Two years later, an American couple travelled to Shaoyang to adopt a Chinese toddler they thought had been abandoned.
Their understanding had been that China's brutal one-child policy was leading to hundreds of abandoned girls, desperate for the care of adopted parents. What they didn't know - and what award-winning journalist Barbara Demick uncovered in 2007, while working as a correspondent in Beijing - was that their daughter had been snatched from her beloved family and her identical twin. Under China's one-child policy hundreds of poor Chinese were giving up their children due to soaring fines and threats of violence. More sinister still, international demand for adoptees was sky-rocketing, and local officials were forcibly seizing children and trafficking them to orphanages, who were selling them abroad.
Daughters of the Bamboo Grove tells the gripping story of separated twins, their respective fates in China and the USA, and Barbara Demick's role in reuniting them against huge odds. Painting a rich portrait of China's history and culture, it asks questions about the roots, impact and consequences of China's one-child policy, the ethics of international adoption, and, ultimately, the assumptions and narratives we hold about the quality of lives lived in the East and the West.
Barbara Demick won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nothing to Envy (Granta, 2010), her seminal book on North Korea, which went on to be shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 'Winner of Winners' Award in 2023. She is also the author of Eat the Buddha (Granta, 2020) which was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize, and Besieged (Granta, 2012), her account of the war in Sarajevo, which won the George Polk Award, the Robert F Kennedy Award and was shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize. She lives in New York.
