Only and lonely

Buy Me the Sky: The Remarkable Truth of China’s One-Child Generation. By Xinran. Translated by Esther Tyldesley and David Dobson. Ebury; 286 pages; £20.

SINCE Xinran Xue wrote “The Good Women of China” in 2002, she has sought to tell the story of ordinary Chinese people. That first, brilliant book was based on a Chinese radio show that Ms Xue (who writes under her first name only) hosted for eight years, inviting women to call in and talk about themselves. The result was a moving and shocking account of what it was like to be a woman in socialist China.

The country is far more open now than it was even two decades ago, yet the task of recounting the first-person experiences of some of its 1.4 billion people is just as vital—and sometimes as tricky. In “Buy Me the Sky”, her seventh book, Ms Xue takes on China’s first generation of only children, those born between 1979 and 1984, after the one-child policy was introduced nationwide. Each chapter uses the life and experiences of a “single sprout”, as she calls them, to enliven a larger story.

The central question is what developing an idea of children...

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