Sky Burial: An Epic Love Story of Tibet

I found the story intriguing and absorbing. I started reading and couldn't put the book down My husband had to make his own dinner. I finished the book in one sitting..

A deeply moving story of love and spirituality. Beautiful, intense, heart wrenching -- and made all the more so as it is true. It brought me to tears. Not a story to be missed.

A friend of mine whom I lovingly refer to as the Uberlibrarian once recommended a book to me that I thought was a total stinker. So when she began to rave about Sky Burial, I was skeptical. After all, the last book she was very enthusiastic about was The Smoke Jumper--which was the aforementioned stinker. Could she be trusted again? Oh, yes. This is a very slender volume of a woman's search for her husband who was reported dead by the Chinese government shortly after their marriage. As they were both doctors, the woman left her home and volunteered her service to the Chinese army, traveling to Tibet in search of her love, hoping he was not dead. Abandoning the army (in a hopeless situation of invasion and occupation), she was adopted by a Tibetean family, changed her way of life and along the way found the truth about his remarkable fate, so much more than the Chinese government had even known. Her journey--which took nearly three decades--is not to be missed. It is a great story written by a female journalist who met this amazing woman and took her story down over the course of two days. Might I add: this is a fantastic book if you are traveling. It is slender and can be read in full on a cross-country flight. You will be so engrossed you probably won't notice when they ask you for coffee or tea or peanuts or whatever.

I picked up Sky Burial in a book store and started to read it and couldn't put it down. I bought the book, brought it home and read it all in one sitting. I thought it was a wonderful book! It is well written, full of passion, love, feeling, harsh reality. It is a must read!

'Sky Burial' is an astounding and remarkable tale and follows hot on the heels of Xinran's first book 'The Good Women of China'. It is a story of love, adventure, loss, friendship, and belonging. It is a true emotional roller-coaster which will, I daresay, not fail to have a profound effect upon most readers. Xinran wrote 'Sky Burial' after a two-day-long conversation with the subject of the story, Shu Wen. Wen left her home town of Suzhou, in the east of China, for Tibet in the mid-1950s in order to discover what had happened to her husband, Kejun, who had been sent there as a doctor in the People's Liberation Army. Wen travels to this vast, distant land as a brave but somewhat naive twenty-six year old Han Chinese woman and returns some three decades later a profoundly different person, having been transformed by time and circumstances into a Tibetan Buddhist nomad. It is unsurprising, having read this book, that Xinran felt an intense desire to tell the world Shu Wen's story. Indeed, Shu Wen's story has, according to Xinran, been one of the three greatest lessons of her life. It will no doubt inspire many other readers with what one may interpet as its main message: that one should never lose hope. The book is also interesting on a number of other levels. Firstly, it is a lesson on cultural exchange; what happens when is thrown into a culture completely alien to their own. The first section of the book explores how acts and beliefs which at first appear barbaric to Shu Wen come to make sense with the passage of time and when explained in their proper cultural context. Secondly, the story is interesting for the insight it provides into the life of Tibetan nomads in particular and Tibetan culture in general. Thirdly, the book sheds a different light on life in the People's Republic of China over the last thirty years in comparison with the works of other authors such as Jung Chang and Ma Jian. 'Sky Burial' is a stunning read, both for those with a deep-seated interest in Chinese and Tibetan culture and also for those who are inspired by tales of extraordinary compassion and humanity.

Now here is an epic story of love, friendship, courage and sacrifice. Set in Chinese-occupied Tibet and based on a true story, Xinran's extraordinary second book takes the reader right to the hidden heart of one of the world's most mysterious and inaccessible countries. In March 1958, Shu Wen, a young woman and doctor learns that her beloved husband, an idealistic army doctor, has died while serving in Tibet not even a hundred days after their marriage. Unwilling to accept this as fact, she sets out to find out what happened to him by joining his regiment in Tibet. For over twenty years she walked, searching for her husband on a life-changing journey through the Tibetan countryside that leads her to a deep appreciation of Tibet in all its beauty and brutality. Sadly, when she finally discovers the truth about her husband, she must carry her knowledge back to a China that, in her absence, has experienced the Cultural Revolution and changed beyond her ken. Xinran has done an amazing job in depicting the vast Tibetan landscape to us. Surely you too will cry as I did when nearing the end of this amazing must read!