Wild Swans

The history of 20th-century China unfolds in Jung Chang's account through three generations of women in her family: her grandmother, her mother and herself. Her grandmother, whose feet were bound, was married off young as the concubine of a high-ranking warlord general. Her mother rose through the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party, while Chang herself joined the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, but in time her father was tortured and she herself was dispatched to the countryside to be reformed in her thinking. A scholarship later took her to England, which remains her home. Translated into 40 languages, the book took the NCR Book Award in 1992 and was named British Book of the Year in 1993.

It is one of the 65 books Richard Branson listed as worth reading in a lifetime.