I am very fortunate in the support I am getting. The poet Jenny Lewis posted this wonderful review on facebook. The success of the audio book is down to the passion and enterprise of Catherine O’Brien of Essential Audiobooks and to the voice of actress Caroline Huang Mc Laughlin !
https://www.facebook.com/jenny.lewis.7359?fref=nf&pnref=story
I’ve been listening to Sylvia Vetta’s book, Brushstrokes in Time in my car and have several times had to sit, waiting for one of the discs to end before tearing myself away at my journey’s end (I save it up for long car journeys during which I can listen without interruptions). It’s an extraordinary accomplishment and, while creating a thoroughly empathetic central character in the artist, Little Winter, it also provides a frightening account of China during the Cultural Revolution, a period of history that led to anarchy and the almost complete breakdown of society. The lives of those who survived to tell the story are told with sensitivity and vivid detail that makes the book live powerfully in the mind (e.g. the episode in Manchuria where Little Winter starts to train as a ‘barefoot doctor’). This is an important book and hard to put down once started (or turn off, in my case, as I’m enjoying the audio book.) It would make a tremendous film – I hope this will happen at some stage. It’s had a huge number of five star reviews – I heartily recommend it –
