Xinran Xue's five best-selling books have covered more of contemporary China than the works of perhaps any other scribe, pulling together the country's vast geography, political tensions, polarised generations and genders.
She squeezes as many of the 1.3 billion Chinese into her pages as possible, and it is all, she admits, to move closer to just one of them. Her latest book, China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation, is dedicated to 'the mothers of China and my mother, Xujun'.
While discussing the book's interviews with the elderly people who lived through and led China during the 20th century, Xinran constantly comes back to her mother. Xujun was wealthy, educated and worldly when she was jailed by Red Guards yet maintained a distance from her daughter while she worked for the nation.
Xinran, 50, says the emotional distance between her mother's generation and the rest of China has left them isolated by guilt, while their grandchildren are increasingly ignorant of national history.
Asked if she writes to close the gap to her parents, Xinran says: 'It's true. I am trying to understand why my mother gave me life but didn't give me time. I never had a chance to be a daughter in many ways.
'In my late teens I didn't feel like a real daughter to my mother, because I didn't feel that kind of love I read about in western books.
'We didn't feel we were as important to our parents as children are in other generations and other countries. When I tried to hug and kiss my mother in London, she pushed me away. I was very hurt by this. Her simple answer was, 'don't do that, I'm Chinese, I'm not used [to western shows of affection]'. But my mother worked with Russians and Germans and spoke their languages. My father speaks six foreign languages.