Yang Tianyi is a "leftover woman" and under pressure to find a husband. She is attractive and intelligent but knows little of the world, and finally makes a disastrous marriage to a man, Wang Lian. At the end of the 1980s, in Tiananmen Square, she meets her love Hua Zheng again. However, after the political turmoil, Hua Zheng is framed as one of the perpetrators of the disturbances, and is sentenced to prison. Set against the background of China's turbulent 1980s and 1990s, Crystal Wedding is a novel of searing emotional honesty. (Winner of English Pen Translates Award).

Xu Xiaobin is an influential and prolific Chinese woman writer of novels, novellas and essays. Her major works translated into English include Crystal Wedding, Feathered Serpent, Dunhuang Dreams. She has been awarded numerous literary prizes including the inaugural Lu Xun Literature Prize. She is also highly regarded as a painter and is skilled in the folk art of paper engraving.