As the Sun Sets

At fifty-eight, Shu Yuting had spent half her life repaying debts of gratitude, enduring hardship, and compromising until she had almost forgotten who she was.

She was a doctoral advisor in Classical Philology at Peking University's Department of Chinese Language and Literature. She had taught for half her life, with students flourishing all over the country. But at home, she was nothing more than a housekeeper who cooked and mopped, and was not allowed to have opinions of her own.

On her golden wedding anniversary, she finally bought the Burberry khaki trench coat she had waited her whole life for. Forty years ago, she had not even been allowed to touch one. Forty years later, she wore it.

But only minutes later, her daughter-in-law took a pair of scissors and cut the coat to shreds. Her son stood by and did nothing, her grandson mocked her, and her husband, Chen Jianguo, kicked her so hard she flew into the coffee table. Blood from her forehead blurred her vision.

She had collated some of the most difficult historical gazetteers of the Ming and Qing dynasties, yet could not figure out how to walk out through that door. Then she ran downstairs barefoot, her hands and head still bleeding, and looked back at the house she had spent half her life serving. No one came after her.

Before the sun sets, there is always one last beam of light.

After the divorce, she was rehired by the National Library's Ancient Books Preservation Center. She thought all that remained of life was returning books, filing records, and supervising the restoration of damaged manuscripts. But a plot to swap out ancient manuscripts, the hand of her ex-husband Chen Jianguo, and the web spun by her daughter-in-law Lin Man and the storeroom clerk Zhao Yong came crashing down around her...