Where Spring Returns Late

On the day of her divorce, Qingming passed without rain. Lin Shutong, an architectural designer who had spent half her life building a career in Beijing, had just ended a loveless marriage when she received word that her mother was missing. Forced to make the journey home after twenty years away, she returned to Shuangxi Town, a water town in Jiangnan.

Her once-glamorous, detached city life came crashing to an end. In its place were a mother with dementia who no longer recognized her, a damp old house packed with memories, and Shen Zhijie, the boy she had secretly loved as a teenager, reappearing without warning. As she tended to her mother through the small routines of daily life, she slowly pieced together the courage and tenderness her mother had forgotten, and began to see the family ties she had neglected and the desolation within herself.

From being forced to stay to choosing to put down roots, from mutual blame to reconciliation with her younger brother, from restrained glances to hearts in harmony, Lin Shutong finally learned, in the slower passage of time, to make peace with her family of origin, her failed marriage, and her exhausted self.

Her mother's memories gradually faded, but love never left. When the spring breeze swept through the town once more, Lin Shutong finally understood that every long-delayed homecoming, every belated reconciliation, and every late-blooming spring would eventually arrive at the warmest place of all.