Rights Sold: Polish (Grupa Wydawnicza Foksal), simplified Chinese (Shanghai Elegant House), Vietnamese (AZ), Turkish English Translation Available   Searching for answers after a student suicide, a lead teacher at an elite girls school delves into the dark shadows cast by a culture of overachievement, reawakening the painful wounds that lie buried in her past.   Wu I-kuang never thought she’d live past age seventeen, much less become a teacher at a respected high school with one hundred years of tradition behind it. But even more unimaginable to Wu: one day after classes let out, one of her students leaps from the top floor of a campus building. By the time Wu arrives on the scene the body had been removed, but the crowd of parents that have gathered, the pool of blood on the ground, and the distant wail of the ambulance siren are enough to tell her that an invisible but devastating trial by public opinion is already underway.   After the suicide, a pall of anxiety settles over the elite girls’ school. The students, normally quick with an answer, struggle to come to terms with the new questions posed by their classmate’s death: what had gone wrong? Had her grades been falling? Was she psychologically OK? What had made a seventeen-year-old decide her life was no longer worth living? Students and faculty alike are in desperate need of answers, whether to clear up their personal doubts and confusion, to deal with the media attention, or possibly to absolve themselves of responsibility.   As a lead teacher, Wu is also trying to make sense of the girl’s death. She needs a rational, firm, and comforting explanation she can present to her students, their parents, the public, and, also, to herself. Glimmers of an answer appear in the lives of her young students, but again and again, the threads lead her into the darker corners of her own life: a marriage that exists only for appearance’s sake, a lifetime of appeasing a controlling mother, and a youth in which she had also considered ending it all.   A master at depicting parent-child relationships, with this novel author Wu Xiaole turns her penetrating gaze to an elite high school, conjuring teacher-student interactions, student social dynamics, and the dilemmas of modern education within an interwoven narrative that spans past and present. Through the eyes of her female protagonist, she painstakingly dissects a suffocating mother-daughter relationship and the costs imposed by society’s narrow standards of success. Readers will find much that resonates with their own experiences in this story of one woman’s struggle to liberate herself from the shackles of conventional values and assert her right to take charge of her own life.