Historical Fiction

When Dr. Lian Xu loses her university position over a controversial paper on insect memory, she retreats to the only place that might still accept her: a crumbling house on the outskirts of Nanjing where her grandmother once kept bees.

The hives are still alive. They shouldn’t be — no one has tended them in twenty years. As Lian studies their impossible survival, she begins to decode movement patterns that map precisely onto events her family has refused to speak about since 1937.

What follows is a novel about silence, inheritance, and the unbearable weight of what small creatures carry so that larger ones can pretend to forget.