Ian Johnson is one of the most experienced and thoughtful Western journalists writing about China. Now he has turned his attention to one of the most important battles in contemporary China: the struggle to control history … Moving and full of human character and detail. It’s a compelling read, beautifully written, and the product of deep research carried out in China over many years … an exemplary tribute.

Sparks is a work of scholarship, investigative journalism of a kind that rarely happens in the age of slashed budgets, with eyewitness accounts of brutality that will chill your blood … Johnson’s stories bring these numbers, and this history, chillingly alive.

A skilful exploration… Johnson’s skill lies in demonstrating the philosophical links between China’s geography and its political and cultural landscape … It is deeply satisfying to read a book about China that could only have been written after decades of serious engagement with the country.

A striking account … This immersive survey combines interviews, firsthand reportage, and historical research to paint a moving group portrait of China’s political dissidents.

Mr Johnson’s ability to evade controls and gain the trust of his subjects is evident in his compellingly written work. The result is a rare insight into the extraordinary risks that some Chinese take to illuminate the darkest corners of communism.

An indelible feat of reporting and an urgent read, Sparks is alive with the voices of the countless Chinese who fiercely, improbably, refuse to let their histories be forgotten. It’s a privilege to read books like these.

A revelation: this historian from overseas spent years penetrating the world of underground Chinese historians, becoming in his own right a recorder of pioneers such as Hu Jie, Ai Xiaoming, and Jiang Xue, who use text and video to record China’s lost history.

This compelling and highly enjoyable book will greatly enhance the general reader’s understanding of the subtle counter-currents of resistance at work in Chinese society below the smooth surface of control and compliance.

A powerful narrative of how the human spirit has survived the cruel repression of Maoist totalitarianism and is still doing the same against Xi Jinping’s determined efforts to impose a new form of digital totalitarianism … A must read for anyone interested in the Chinese and China.

Ian Johnson has conducted some of the most important grassroots research of any foreign journalist in China. With Sparks, he turns his attention to history – not the sanctioned, censored, and selective history promoted by the Communist Party, but the independent histories that are being written and filmed by brave individuals across the country. This book is a powerful reminder of the ways in which China’s future depends on who controls the past.