An expansive yet personal story of a prideful teacher, her husband, their quietly rebellious daughter, and a town changed by the breakneck pressures of modernization

After a long separation, a writer living in America reunites with her family in a small, industrial town in China. On her return, she looks back at her fraught relationship with her mother and finds herself telling her story from the beginning, going back as far as living memory will allow. As she chronicles her mother's life, she details the intimate moments they shared as they weathered fights, layoffs, and illnesses, and she unearths the forces that pressurized and combusted their lives: echoes of distant wars and not-too-distant revolutions, tides of breakneck modernization, and the relentless erosion of time.

For fans of Annie Ernaux’s The Years, Three is fable-like and precise, at once a sweeping view of an era and an elegy for a splintered family.