Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a true story of abduction, adoption and separated twins

New York Times editors’ best 25 books (so far) of 2025 choice (“This story packs a wallop.” Notable books, NPR best books, New Yorker, Esquire Magazine (UK, best ten non-fiction books of 2025

Short-listed National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction,  Long-listed Women’s Prize (UK) and Baillie Gifford Prize. Winner of Christopher Welles Memorial Prize, Columbia Journalism School

“Excellent…entrancing and disturbing… [Barbara Demick] is one of our finest chroniclers of East Asia. She hammers together strong, solid sentence after strong, solid sentence — until the grandeur of the architecture comes into focus. Demick’s characters are richly drawn, and her stories, often reported over a span of years, deliver a rare emotional wallop.”—The New York Times

“One of the finest nonfiction writers of her generation.”– The Observer 

Buy Now Buy Now Buy Now

The method is programmatic openness, deep listening, a willingness to be waylaid; the effect, a prismatic picture of history as experienced and understood by individuals in their full amplitude and idiosyncrasy

The New York Times

This book  (Daughters of the Bamboo Grove) is resounding proof that nobody can understand China without reading Barbara Demick…. She writes with  such humanity and literary grace that this envelops you like a novel in which every word is true.

Evan Osnos, author of Age of Ambition

Barbara Demick has produced an elegiac narrative of a frontier town that is a hotbed of resistance on the Tibetan plateau. With novelistic depth and through characteristically painstaking research, Demick offers a poignant reminder of the enduring power of memory to illuminate untold histories. Eat the Buddha is an exemplary piece of storytelling.

Tsering Shakya, author of The Dragon in the Land of Snows

Barbara Demick’s new book is essential reading for anyone interested in China and Tibet. The reporting is rich, the writing is beautiful, and the stories will stay with you. I couldn’t put it down.

John Pomfret, author of The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom

    Barbara Demick is author of Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea and Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood and the recently released Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town, published by Random House in July 2020. She was bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times in Beijing and Seoul, and previously reported from the Middle East and Balkans for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

    Learn More