"An important, even invaluable book, a moving farewell to the old, more humane way of life as China and all the world become technologized and globalized."—Maxine Hong Kingston

A dam rises on the Yangtze, uprooting a million lives in a government-made, modern environmental and human rights disaster, and a poor salvager who has lost everything finds an abandoned baby girl. A tale of defiance, of a lost man finding his place—and a new kind of love—in modern China, and of a rich man reclaiming his soul and the woman he loved before the revolution tore them apart.