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    Brothers: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Brothers: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Brothers: A Novel
    Audiobook15 hours

    Brothers: A Novel

    Written by Da Chen

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    At the height of China's Cultural Revolution a powerful general fathered two sons. Tan was born to the general's wife and into a life of comfort and luxury. His half brother, Shento, was born to the general's mistress, who threw herself off a cliff in the mountains of Balan only moments after delivering her child. Growing up, each remained ignorant of the other's existence. In Beijing, Tan enjoyed the best schools, the finest clothes, and the prettiest girls. Shento was raised on the mountainside by an old healer and his wife until their deaths landed him in an orphanage, where he was always hungry, alone, and frightened. Though on divergent roads, each brother is driven by a passionate desire-one to glorify his father, the other to seek revenge against him.

    Separated by distance and opportunity, Tan and Shento follow the paths that lie before them, while unknowingly falling in love with the same woman and moving toward the explosive moment when their fates finally merge.

    Brothers, by bestselling memoirist Da Chen, is a sprawling, dynamic family saga, complete with assassinations, love affairs, narrowly missed opportunities, and the ineluctable fulfillment of destiny.


    From the Hardcover edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateSep 26, 2006
    ISBN9781415933909
    Unavailable
    Brothers: A Novel
    Author

    Da Chen

    Dr. Da Chen is currently an ARC (Australian Research Council) DECRA (Discovery Early Career Researcher Award) fellow at Department of Infrastructure Engineering, the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is also an Honorary Research Fellow at School of Civil Engineering, the University of Queensland, where he obtained his PhD degree in June 2018. He worked as a research fellow at MFM and ISMD, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. He will shortly join School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UNSW (University of New South Wales) Sydney, as a lecturer. Dr. Chen has an interdisciplinary research background across structural, material, and mechanical engineering with a focus on the advanced composite structural forms for various end-user applications, such as novel lightweight non-uniform foam components, graphene reinforced nanocomposites, vibration absorbers, concrete columns, and offshore fish cages. His study promotes the development of functionally graded porous structures and has been widely acknowledged. His research achievements include 6 Highly Cited Papers (top performing 1%), 2330 Web of Science citations, and 7.72 for Field-Weighted Citation Impact (2017-2021, SciVal), as of January 2023.

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    Reviews for Brothers

    3.5/5

    35 ratings2 reviews

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    • 1/5
      This novel is set in mid-20th century China during the transition between the rule of Chairman Mao and his immediate successors. It follows the lives of two young men, the sons of a prominent Chinese general, one legitimate, raised in all the opulence of upper class Beijing, the other illegitimate and raised in peasant squalor.MINOR SPOILERS FOLLOWThe writing is very simple and the story is in no way unique. My biggest problem is with the utter absurdity of the premise and many of the subsequent events. For example, the illegitimate son is born as his disgraced mother is in the process of committing suicide by jumping off of a sheer cliff; literally, as in evacuating the birth canal in mid-air. The baby survives, believe it or not by becoming hung in tree branches. Okay.Even more absurd is the fact that in a nation of one billion people, the two brothers, separated by thousands of miles, actually meet and fall in love with the same orphaned young woman. Really.This young woman, the heroine of the novel, is brutally gang raped. Immediately thereafter, and I mean immediately, she has ardent and passionate sexual intercourse with her rescuer. I’m not joking. I don’t know who Da Chen is, but pretty clearly he is a clueless male.Perhaps equally as absurd is the rapidity and ease by which one of the characters goes from being a penniless beggar to the richest man in China in the space of about five years, owning hundreds of businesses, all of which are wildly successful from the start.This is a book so absurd that it was impossible for me to enjoy reading it. I actually became disgusted at the extent to which the author took his readers for clueless simpletons. Some have used the term magical realism to describe the author’s writing. This is not magical realism. It only seems like it because the author’s story lines are so absurd and ridiculous. Leave this one for the Harlequin crowd.
    • 5/5
      Great book on all levels! The juxtaposition between the two protagonists is fantastic. You feel hatred, love, and sorrow for all the characters at one time or another throughout the twisted storyline. Brilliant book! One of the, if not the, best book I have read this year.