Chinese Cinderella

Adeline Yen Mah (Author)
Adeline Yen Mah lives in California after growing up in Tianjin and Shanghai in China, Hong Kong and England. She studied medicine but gave up her career as a physician to become a full-time writer. After the death of her stepmother, she felt compelled to write her story and the result, Falling Leaves became an international bestseller. Adeline has written several other books for adults and children including Chinese Cinderella and the Secret Dragon Society, an adventure based on her own made-up stories when she was a lonely child.

Ngadi Smart (Illustrator)
Ngadi Smart is a Sierra-Leonean visual artist and designer based between London, UK, and Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. Her practice consists of illustration, photography and design. She also works as a mixed-media artist, primarily in the form of collage art. In her illustration work, she is motivated by the representation of minorities, highlighting cultural identity and racial discrimination, as well as themes on feminism and gender roles. She likes to deconstruct mainstream society's views of what is 'normal', 'beautiful' and 'right'. She has illustrated for the Atlantic, Time Out London, Eastpak and the Guardian, among others.

The author recreates moments of cruelty and victory so convincingly that readers will feel almost as if they're in the same room with her.

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To me, writing was pure pleasure. It thrilled me to be able to escape the horrors of my daily life in such a simple way. When I wrote, I forgot that I was the unwanted daughter who caused her mother's death. I could be anybody I wished to be.

When her mother dies shortly after her birth, lonely Adeline is marked as 'bad luck' and treated as an outcast by her own family, shown kindness only by her grandfather and Aunt Baba who encourage her to follow her dreams.

Adeline strives to win her father's acceptance by excelling in school, but instead discovers an escape in the friendships of her classmates and her talent for writing. For the first time Adeline allows herself to dream of a real future as a writer and yearns to study in England with her brother - but it is a future she will have to fight with every ounce of strength she has to achieve.

Chinese Cinderella is Adeline Yen Mah's true story of survival and self-acceptance during her childhood as an unwanted daughter, and how she overcame her past to believe in a better future.

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