Great, thought provoking and insightful

well worth a read.

Good comprehensive yet accessible account of those events that are hard to forget...for some

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Exposing the world's most dangerous regime

A story of a violent authoritarian regime - the Chinese Communist Party - that needed to be told.

Thank you Louisa Lim. You are doing great work. Hopefully one day we will see a safe and free China.

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Simply essential

Lies written in ink can never disguise facts written in blood.

This book is ostensibly about the killing of citizens by the Communist Party in Tiananmen Square, Beijing in 1989 (as well as elsewhere in China), but that is really only a starting point for a much broader exploration of modern China - and the astonishing effect created by a political system that, by using fear as a tool, closely controls what people learn, say, think and remember.

For anyone unfamiliar with how the world's largest economy is run, this provides a blood-chilling, eye-opening insight. As a work of journalism, it is brave and important. For if these people had not passed on their memories for the public record, they would be lost in time.

“The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible,” wrote Salman Rushdie. There is no real accountability in modern China. There are no real laws. There is only the Party. It is a land of security cameras, checkpoint guards and police.

"Does what happened in Tiananmen Square a quarter of a century ago still matter?" muses Louisa Lim, the author (and narrator) of this brilliant and essential work. On a personal level, it matters to the people she spoke to, many of whom saw loved ones butchered and their murders swept out of history. But it matters to everyone. It is a lesson in the toxic inhumanity of unchallenged, unchecked power.

What can be done? Read this book. Value facts, truth and the sometimes messy and confrontational nature of democracy. Remember the past, and hope for better things to come.

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Stranger than any fiction

Often I am wary of books narrated by their authors. In this case, I don’t think anyone could have narrated it any better. Louisa Lim puts her soul into this reading, and leaves you feeling that you’ve actually lived through the experiences she describes. That’s partly because she spend years tracking down and interviewing those who witnessed or lost family members in the Tiananmen massacre, some of whom have never dared to speak to anyone about it before, and partly because she herself witnessed at first hand the well honed techniques developed since Tiananmen by a paranoid totalitarian dictatorship to suppress public unrest before anyone has time to organise it. She presents a truly honest and unflinching picture of the dystopian nightmare which modern China is rapidly becoming. A truly unforgettable but very necessary book, which captures for posterity the truth about crimes which the Chinese government is very successfully in the process of erasing from the collective consciousness of an entire nation.

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