In an ancient Jiangnan city called Qinghe, deep in an unremarkable old street, stands a towering parasol tree that has witnessed a century of wind and rain. Its broad canopy has sheltered generation after generation, while its roots have intertwined countless ordinary yet profound stories.
The story begins in the late 1970s and follows several families and more than a dozen boys and girls, each with a distinct personality, who grew up beneath the tree. From sharing candy and burying secrets there as children, to the first bewildering stirrings of love, heated arguments, and boundless hopes and uncertainty about the future in adolescence; from the first major turning point in their lives after the resumption of the college entrance examinations, to leaving the old street and setting out for different arenas of life amid the tide of reform and opening up.
With the meticulous sweep of an epic, the novel traces the lives of these childhood friends over more than four decades:
* Lin Jing'an: A bright, sensitive girl who yearns for literature and distant horizons. Yet family ties and the constraints of her times leave her struggling again and again between ideals and reality. She and Lu Yuanyang, the
