ADVANCE PRAISE

“Oasis offers an intimate, absorbing glimpse into the day-to-day lives of young people in rural and urban China—their hopes, their loves, their ambitions—in the years leading up to the 1989 student uprising at Tiananmen Square. This powerful and unforgettable story of the sacrifices we make when we choose between two widely divergent worlds will stay with me for a long, long time.”

—Alka Joshi, author of The Henna Artist and the Jaipur Trilogy

“Gripping and evocative, Oasis immerses us in Kaier’s tumultuous trajectory from her impoverished childhood in rural China to medical school in Nanjing. Yang Huang’s novel, rich and wide-ranging, illuminates many themes, but at its heart is a love story you won’t soon forget.”

—Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History

“By turns searing and tender, Yang Huang’s Oasis is an epic that spans decades of social and political transformation in China, sweeping across the deserts of Gansu to the bustle of Nanjing to the shores of Hainan. Kaier is an unforgettable heroine, whose journey exemplifies the survival, heartbreak, and the courage necessary to claim your own destiny. A triumph.”

—Vanessa Hua, author of Forbidden City and Coyoteland

“What does it mean to leave a home and struggle to make a new one? To find an education? Learn to love? Yang Huang takes us on a gripping journey through rural and urban China after the Cultural Revolution. Lushly imagined and psychologically nuanced, Oasis will live long in my mind and heart.”

—Elizabeth Graver, author of Kantika

“Yang Huang’s Oasis—the rural hometown in China where her young protagonist is born and grows up—is disappearing. All that the land has given—water, food, health, family, and community—is being wounded by violent dust storms, drought, and unfettered development. With keen insight and emotional resonance, Huang tells the story of a young woman’s deep ties to a people and a way of life she loves, but must leave in order to survive. Oasis is a clear and sharp depiction of the hard choices many of us must make during this unprecedented time of transition.”

—Susanne Pari, author of In the Time of Our History

“Oasis is a heartfelt and richly authentic coming-of-age portrait of a young girl whose fate is inextricably tied to the ecological devastation of rural China after the Cultural Revolution.”

—Aimee Liu, judge of Cai Emmons Fiction Award and author of Glorious Boy