VIRGINIA PYE
DREAMS OF THE RED PHOENIX
During the dangerous summer of 1937, a newly widowed American missionary finds herself and her teenage son caught up in the midst of a Japanese invasion of North China and the simultaneous rise of Communism. Meanwhile a charismatic Red Army officer requests her help and seems to have shared some surprising secret about her husband. Shirley must manage her grief even as she navigates between her desire to help the idealistic Chinese Reds fight the Japanese by serving as a nurse and the need to save both herself and her son by escaping the war-ravaged country before it’s too late.
Taking her own grandmother’s life as inspiration, Virginia Pye, author of the critically-acclaimed debut novel River of Dust, has written a stunning new novel of Americans in China on the cusp of World War II.
$16.00 | Paperback | 5 1/2 x 8 1/4 | 288 pages
October 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60953-123-2 | Carton Quantity: 24
EISBN: 978-1-60953-124-9
The Reverend Caleb Carson gazed up at the scudding clouds and counted his blessings to see another day. He had always thought of himself as a man of simple pleasures and one of them was to be out-of-doors on a fine, summer morning like this one. To breathe in crisp, mountain air that reminded him of his boyhood in New Hampshire, though little else about this rugged setting was the same. The cedar trees here were spindlier, the scrub brush more spiked, the rocks more jagged than those in the mountains of his youth.
Even when he had crossed this range in North China as a healthy man, he had felt it blanket his spirit with barrenness and gloom. At dangerous bends in the trail, the Chinese had placed simple altars to their ancestors and gods. Over his five years of expeditions to the outlying churches, Caleb had come to understand that stopping to pray in any fashion was entirely the right idea. Otherwise, the setting felt altogether too godless, and the poor traveler abandoned to his fate.
Yet the sky overhead now on this summer morning struck him as promising. With some effort, he turned his head to his good side and gazed over the cliff towards the long valley below and to the town too far in the distance to see. That he suspected he would die before ever returning to his home in that distance caused a literal, dull ache in his heart, while the rest of his body was shot through with a simpler, more searing pain.
Virginia Pye holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and has taught writing at the University of Pennsylvania and New York University. Her highly acclaimed first novel, River of Dust, is also a historical novel set in China. Her father, Lucian W. Pye, was born and raised in China and became an eminent political scientist and sinologist. Her grandfather, Watts O. Pye, was a founder of the Oberlin College-Shansi Program which took him and his wife, Gertrude, to China as the first returning missionaries after the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. Her grandmother stayed in China after the death of her husband and fled with her son—Virginia’s father—on the last ship out of China to the U.S. following Pearl Harbor. Pye currently divides her time between Richmond, VA, and Boston, MA.Author photo by Terry Brown.
