Startling Moon is the coming of age of young Taotao, who spends much of her childhood in the care of her paternal grandparents, blissfully unaware of the hardships endured by her parents and maternal grandparents during the Cultural Revolution.

The author admits that much of the first third of the book, including an incident in which five-year-old Taotao cheerfully sings patriotic songs to a packed theatre to prove her mother is a good communist, is semi-autobiographical.

Liu Hong, 38, grew up near the Korean border in Manchuria and sang similar ditties, including We Wave To Our Comrades, The Koreans Across The River and I Love Tiananmen Square In Beijing.

For a long time, Liu Hong never understood the lengths her mother went to, to keep her family safe. It wasn't until she was in her 30s - when a stranger in England asked her about her childhood - that she discovered the truth. 'I'd told people it wasn't hard, but suddenly realised my parents had protected me from the suffering of my elders,' she says.

Her maternal grandparents had been labelled 'rightists' and exiled to the countryside for 10 years. But to a naive Liu Hong, their peasant life sounded idyllic in their letters. Her mother kept her parents' identity a secret to ensure that she and her brother would grow up as ordinary children.

'I had no sympathy as I didn't know she had protected us,' says Liu Hong. 'I had always thought I had a normal childhood. Because I was so well protected, I had some good times. I even enjoyed being a Red Guard.'

But once the full realisation hit, Liu Hong was saddened to think that neither her parents nor grandparents had a voice. Startling Moon was her effort to recover one for them. It was picked up by Headline soon after Liu Hong sent the manuscript to London-based literary agent Toby Eady, who specialises in Chinese authors, and helped her secure a four-book deal with the publisher. The book, which took a year of focused attention to write, is named for a piece of poetry by Tang poet Wang Wei that Taotao's grandfather recites to her upon his return from the countryside.

Liu Hong read voraciously in her youth, at first in Chinese, but later in English, after a neighbour who had been to America began to teach her the language. He lent the teenager a copy of Snow White, which was one of her most prized possessions for many years. Her parents approved of such reading irrespective of the content because they considered her English studies to be worthwhile at a time when schools did not operate in China. She began to write a diary in English, too, as it ensured that her parents could not read her private thoughts.

'I liked the sound of English,' Liu Hong says. 'And there were no negative overtones, like colonialism, where I lived.'

Liu Hong's love affair with the language led her to study English literature at university in Wuhan. There, she befriended an English woman, who encouraged her to continue her studies at Oxford. Influenced in part by the political climate in China (it was 1989, the year of the Tiananmen massacre, though the author stresses that she is 'not a democracy fighter or anything'), Liu Hong left for Oxford, then moved to London, where she met her husband Jon. The pair now live in Wiltshire, with three-year-old daughter Ann, whose name means 'peace' in Chinese.

Liu Hong, who also teaches Chinese in Britain, is modest about her English-language ability, though she is an eloquent speaker as well as a lovely writer. 'I think and feel in English. I dream in English, which is very odd for a Chinese person,' she says.

'Chinese language and culture are like the soil that gave me nutrients, but English is the language that has made me free.'