The year is 1991, and the addition to their household of a Chinese refugee fleeing the post-Tiananmen Square crackdown, Ai-Ming, is the catalyst that sets the rest of the plot into motion.

These sub-plots are set during a tumultuous period in China's history, from the beginning of Mao Zedong's reign in the late 1940s to the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

[6] Within the plot of the novel this anthem occurs at numerous points, particularly as a rallying cry for the student protesters at Tiananmen Square, at which Ai-Ming and Sparrow are present: "The people around her were weeping.

Also referenced in the novel is the song "The East is Red", which was used as the unofficial national anthem during the Cultural Revolution within which many of the events in the Kai and Sparrow's subplots occur.

Highlighting the novel's interaction "with history and memory in [an] extraordinarily delicate fashion", Bethune claimed that "it is a story of such beauty that it provokes a paradoxical hope".

[20] Following the announcement of the 2016 Giller Prize, Mark Medley of The Globe and Mail wrote that "while Ms. Thien has long been considered one of [Canada]'s most talented young writers, with her books receiving critical acclaim, the country's major literary awards had eluded her - until this year".

[21] Lawrence Hill, a juror on the panel for the Giller Prize, called the novel a "beautiful look at the salvation of music and love and life in the face of genocide.

[21] Bronwyn Drainie of the Literary Review of Canada wrote that Thien "[creates] a memorial for the millions of lives lost, disappeared, shriveled or wasted during not just the years of Mao’s reign but back to the famine of 1910 and forward to the dashed hopes of Tiananmen in 1989.