Flame from the Rock – Tan Yun (1944) (1st UK ed)

S$63.00

Flame from the Rock – Tan Yun (1944) (1st UK ed)

S$63.00

The first UK edition of the first novel written by Tan Yun, daughter of acclaimed writer Lin Yutang, about wartime China.

Title: Flame from the Rock

Author: Tan Yun

Publisher: William Heinemann, London, 1944. First UK edition.

Condition: Hardcover, with dust jacket. Very good. Dust jacket tanned with tiny closed tears, interior is very good condition. A thin book, 220pp on thin paper, app 7.5″x5″.

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About the book (from back cover):

A comment by Pearl S. Buck:

“The war is the continuous and grim background for this love story of China, which is at once tender and wholly unsentimental. It is the story of two young people who are thrown together out of the turbulent world of war. The soldier hero is such a young man as only our times can produce, and perhaps only China can produce – homeless, rootless, but not lost, taking it for granted that he must go on fighting until the war is won. He remembers nothing but war, and thinks of himself only as a soldier, not because he enjoys it, but because that is simply what he has had to be. Upon this harsh and yet deep nature the tender and true-hearted girl pours her first love.

The story is a tragedy – it has to be a tragedy, for the war will suck these two under again. But for the space in which they are together they build a world of their own, luminous and beautiful.

It is a true and living picture of China’s young.”

About the author (from Wikipedia):

Adet Lin (May 6, 1923 – 1971) was a Chinese-American novelist and translator. She also published under the name Tan Yun. She was also known as Lin Rusi.

The oldest daughter of Lin Yutang, she was born in Amoy and came to the United States at the age of thirteen. With her sisters Tai-yi and Mei Mei, she published Our Family, an autobiographical work, in 1939. In 1940, with Tai-yi, she published Girl Rebel, a translation of the autobiography of Xie Bingying. The sisters published a second book, Dawn over Chungking, in 1941. After studying at Columbia University, she went on to work for the American Bureau for Medical Aid to China from 1943 to 1946. Afterwards, she returned to the United States and worked for the United States Information Agency and the Voice of America.

She published her first novel Flame from the Rock in 1943; the book is set in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War.

On May 1, 1946, she married Richard Biow, son of advertising executive Milton Biow. Lin killed herself in Taipei in 1971.