X: Xinran's Sky Burial (2004)

Xue Xinran is a British-Chinese journalist who has devoted her career to telling women’s stories. Her story Sky Burial is the one tome in the Penguin Drop Caps series that doesn’t fit snugly in one genre. Is it biography? Romance? Travel literature?


For her radio show, Xinran interviews Shu Wen, a grey-plaited woman in Tibetan dress. However, it takes Shu Wen two days to explain how she, a Chinese woman, came to be dressed in traditional Tibetan clothing, “smelling strongly of old leather, rancid milk, and animal dung.” So taken is Xinran with her tale of love and loss that she must write the whole story.

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