
Daughters of the Bamboo Grove
From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins
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Narrated by:
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Joy Osmanski
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By:
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Barbara Demick
About this listen
The heartrending story of twin sisters torn apart by China’s one-child policy and the rise of international adoption—from the author of the National Book Award finalist Nothing to Envy
“Excellent . . . entrancing and disturbing . . . [Demick] is one of our finest chroniclers of East Asia. . . . [Her] characters are richly drawn, and her stories, often reported over a span of years, deliver a rare emotional wallop.”—The New York Times
On a warm day in September 2000, a woman named Zanhua gave birth to twin girls in a small hut behind her brother’s home in China’s Hunan province. The twins, Fangfang and Shuangjie, were welcome additions to her family but also not her first children. Living under the shadow of China’s notorious one-child policy, Zanhua and her husband decided to leave one twin in the care of relatives, hoping each toddler on their own might stay under the radar. But, in 2002, Fangfang was violently snatched away. The family worried they would never see her again, but they didn’t imagine she could be sent as far as the United States. She might as well have been sent to another world.
Following stories she wrote as the Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, Barbara Demick embarks on a journey that encompasses the origins, shocking cruelty, and long-term impact of China’s one-child rule; the rise of international adoption and the religious currents that buoyed it; and the exceedingly rare phenomenon of twin separation. Today, Esther—formerly Fangfang—lives in Texas, and Demick brings to vivid life the Christian family that felt called to adopt her, unaware that she had been kidnapped. Through Demick’s indefatigable reporting, will the long-lost sisters finally reunite—and will they feel whole again?
A remarkable window into the volatile, constantly changing China of the last half century and the long-reaching legacy of the country’s most infamous law, Daughters of the Bamboo Grove is also the moving story of two sisters torn apart by the forces of history and brought together again by their families’ determination and one reporter’s dogged work.
©2025 Barbara Demick (P)2025 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Excellent . . . entrancing and disturbing . . . [Barbara Demick] is one of our finest chroniclers of East Asia. [Her] characters are richly drawn, and her stories, often reported over a span of years, deliver a rare emotional wallop.”—The New York Times
“This book is resounding proof that nobody can understand China without reading Barbara Demick, because she unearths stories the government wants buried.”—Evan Osnos, National Book Award-winning author of Age of Ambition
“[Demick] has written with impeccable empathy for everyone involved, Chinese and western. . . . She captures the essence of rural Chinese society in a way few western observers have done.”—The Times (UK)
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Story
Growing up in an isolated cabin in Montana in the mid-1990s, Jane knows only the world that she and her father live in: the woodstove that heats their home, the vegetable garden where they try to eke out a subsistence, the books of nineteenth-century philosophy that her father gives her to read in lieu of going to school. Her father is elusive about their pasts, giving Jane little beyond the facts that they once lived in the Bay Area and that her mother died in a car accident, the crash propelling him to move Jane off the grid to raise her in a Waldenesque utopia.
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Wow
- By Lacey Murillo on 06-09-25
By: Janelle Brown
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Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk into a Bar
- By: Katie Yee
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 6 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A man and a woman walk into a restaurant. The woman expects a lovely night filled with endless plates of samosas. Instead, she finds out her husband is having an affair with a woman named Maggie. A short while after, her chest starts to ache. She walks into an examination room, where she finds out the pain in her breast isn’t just heartbreak—it’s cancer. She decides to call the tumor Maggie. Unfolding in fragments over the course of the ensuing months, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar follows the narrator as she embarks on a journey of grief, healing, and reclamation.
By: Katie Yee
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The True Happiness Company
- A Memoir
- By: Veena Dinavahi
- Narrated by: Veena Dinavahi
- Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It is hard for Veena Dinavahi to live while her classmates keep dying. The high-achieving daughter of loving Indian immigrants, Veena lives in a typical white American suburb—except for its unusually high suicide rate. For years, she tries to manage her mental health in all the right ways, but nothing seems to work. Until, on a late-night Google search, Veena’s mom discovers Bob Lyon—a sixty-year-old white man in the backwoods of Georgia who claims he can make her want to live again. He calls himself “The True Happiness Company” and, as their relationship progresses, “Daddy.”
By: Veena Dinavahi
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The Art Spy
- The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland
- By: Michelle Young
- Narrated by: Erin Bennett
- Length: 11 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
On August 25, 1944, Rose Valland, a woman of quiet daring, found herself in a desperate position. From the windows of her beloved Jeu de Paume museum, where she had worked and ultimately spied, she could see the battle to liberate Paris thundering around her. The Jeu de Paume, co-opted by Nazi leadership, was now the Germans’ final line of defense. Would the museum curator be killed before she could tell the truth—a story that would mean nothing less than saving humanity’s cultural inheritance?
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Fascinating and inspiring story
- By C. E. Hall on 06-07-25
By: Michelle Young
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Wild Thing
- A Life of Paul Gauguin
- By: Sue Prideaux
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley
- Length: 16 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Paul Gauguin's legend as a transgressive genius arises as much from his biography as his aesthetically daring Polynesian paintings. Gauguin is chiefly known for his pictures that eschewed convention, to celebrate the beauty of an indigenous people and their culture. In this work, Sue Prideaux reveals that while Gauguin was a complicated man, his scandalous reputation is largely undeserved.
By: Sue Prideaux
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The Slip
- By: Lucas Schaefer
- Narrated by: Shaun Taylor-Corbett, Renata Friedman
- Length: 17 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Bobbing and weaving across the ever-shifting canvas of a changing country, The Slip is an audacious, daring look at sex and race in America that builds to an unforgettable collision in the center of the ring.
By: Lucas Schaefer
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El Dorado Drive
- By: Megan Abbott
- Narrated by: Brittany Pressley
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
All I want is to be innocent again. But that's not how it works. Especially not after the Wheel. The three Bishop sisters grew up in privilege in the moneyed suburbs of Detroit. But as the auto industry declined, so did their fortunes. Harper, the youngest, is barely making ends meet when her beloved, charismatic sister Pam—currently in the middle of a contentious battle with her ex-husband—and her eldest sister, Debra, approach her about joining an exciting new club.
By: Megan Abbott
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Summer of Our Discontent
- The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse
- By: Thomas Chatterton Williams
- Narrated by: Thomas Chatterton Williams
- Length: 11 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
An incisive, culturally observant analysis of the evolving mores, manners and taboos of social justice (“anti-racist”) orthodoxy, which has profoundly influenced how we think about diversity and freedom of expression, often with complex or paradoxical consequences.
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A Lesser Light
- A Novel
- By: Peter Geye
- Narrated by: A.W. Miller
- Length: 15 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It's 1910, and Theodulf Sauer has finally achieved a position befitting his ego: master lighthouse keeper at a newly commissioned station towering above Lake Superior. When his new wife, Willa, arrives on the first spring ferry, it's clear her life has taken the opposite turn: after being summoned home from college to Duluth when her father dies, she and her scheming mother find themselves destitute, and Willa is rushed into this ill-suited arranged marriage. As the lighthouse station establishes, the new relationship teeters between tense and hostile.
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Best read of the year.
- By emcibi on 04-29-25
By: Peter Geye
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All Roads Lead to Rome
- Why We Think of the Roman Empire Daily
- By: Rhiannon Garth Jones
- Narrated by: Sarah Durham
- Length: 9 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Rhiannon Garth-Jones explores Rome's enduring legacy through three core themes: religion, empire, and culture. Each chapter examines how Rome’s history, governance, and mythology have been reimagined throughout centuries, and how these interpretations continue to shape our modern world.
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Eat the Buddha
- Life and Death in a Tibetan Town
- By: Barbara Demick
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 11 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A gripping portrait of modern Tibet told through the lives of its people, from the best-selling author of Nothing to Envy.
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TIBET
- By chetyarbrough.blog on 08-24-21
By: Barbara Demick
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How to Lose Your Mother
- A Daughter's Memoir
- By: Molly Jong-Fast
- Narrated by: Molly Jong-Fast
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Molly Jong-Fast is the only child of a famous woman, writer Erica Jong, whose sensational book Fear of Flying launched her into second-wave feminist stardom. She grew up yearning for a connection with her dreamy, glamorous, just out of reach mother, who always seemed to be heading somewhere that wasn’t with Molly. When, in 2023, Erica was diagnosed with dementia just as Molly’s husband discovered he had a rare cancer, Jong-Fast was catapulted into a transformative year.
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Pause and rewind
- By Harkins5 on 06-09-25
By: Molly Jong-Fast
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Sleep
- A Novel
- By: Honor Jones
- Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
- Length: 8 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From a dazzling new talent, the story of a newly divorced young mother forced to reckon with the secrets of her own childhood when she brings her daughters back to the big house where she was raised.
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Best “literary fiction” book in years
- By Lydia Paddon on 05-30-25
By: Honor Jones
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Vera, or Faith
- A Novel
- By: Gary Shteyngart
- Narrated by: Shannon Tyo
- Length: 12 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love one another deeply but the pressures of life in an unstable America are fraying their bonds. Both biting and deeply moving, Vera, or Faith is a boldly imagined story of family and country told through the clear and tender eyes of a child.
By: Gary Shteyngart
Enlightening and Entertaining
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Engrossing Story
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Brilliant!
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