"Ma Jian has accomplished something extremely difficult. That is, he has created a work of art that functions simultaneously as literature and call to action . . . You wish that copies of this book could be distributed along the route of the Olympic torch's progress toward the upcoming Beijing games, an event that might not be taking place had the world not succumbed to the seductions of forgetfulness—the same dangers and temptations that Ma Jian's hero, and his novel, struggle so valiantly to resist."—Fracine Prose, The New York Review of Books

"Snow Falling in Spring joins other important books about the Cultural Revolution . . . as childhood testimonies to national trauma, cautionary tales for our own time, and appreciations for homes, old and new." —San Francisco Chronicle

“Michael Meyer’s voracious curiosity has led him deep, deep into a vanishing world that other visitors and foreign correspondents almost all see only from a taxi window. He comes at it with a wide knowledge of history, a thirst for people’s life stories, a novelist’s ability to evoke a social universe, and an Arctic explorer’s willingness to live through a sub-zero winter with little heat and the nearest communal toilet far down a snowy lane. This is a stunning, compassionate feat of reportage which will long endure.”—Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost and Bury the Chains