Their Divine Fires: Love and Secrets in the Shadow of Chinese Revolutions

Spanning three generations of Chinese and Chinese-American women, Wendy Chen’s debut novel, Their Divine Fires, is both passionate and spell-binding. When a marriage is violently destroyed in 1917 at the dawn of the Chinese Revolution, a woman’s grief and secrets are passed down to her daughters, and in turn, to her granddaughter, haunting each woman through the Cultural Revolution and beyond. The characters’ love affairs and secrets are interwoven with folktale and myth, in a novel author Ruth Madievsky calls, “utterly hypnotic—the kind of novel only a poet could write. Never before have I read a debut that captures so perfectly the ache of what is left unsaid between generations.” Sponsored by the .

This event is part of Fall for the Book's spring lineup. View the full schedule here: https://fallforthebook.org/schedule/

About the Author:

Wendy Chen is the author of the novel Their Divine Fires (Algonquin) and the poetry collection Unearthings (Tavern Books). She is the editor of Figure 1, associate editor-in-chief of Tupelo Quarterly, and prose editor of Tupelo Press. Her poetry translations of Song-dynasty woman writer Li Qingzhao are forthcoming in a collection titled The Magpie at Night from Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2025. She earned her MFA in poetry from Syracuse University and her PhD in English from the University of Denver. Currently, she is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

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