From one of our finest chroniclers of Japan, its history, society and culture - the acclaimed author of Geisha - comes this gripping and richly detailed new historical novel, telling the true story of Princess Atsu and her struggle to save Japan.
Lesley Downer's mother was Chinese and her father a professor of
Chinese, so she grew up in a house full of books on Asia. But it
was Japan, not China, that proved the more alluring, and she lived
there for some fifteen years.
She has written many books about the country and its culture,
including Geisha- The Secret History of a Vanishing World, and
Madame Sadayakko- The Geisha who Seduced the West, and has
presented television programmes on Japan for Channel 4, the BBC and
NHK.
She lives in London with her husband, the author Arthur I. Miller,
and still makes sure she goes to Japan every year.
It is completely absorbing, showing Lesley Downer's deep knowledge
of Japan and her mastery of its complex history during the
nineteenth century.
*LIAN HEARN, author of Across the Nightingale Floor*
A persuasive storyteller and the setting is mesmerising.
*THE TIMES*
Superb. A wonderful evocation of an alien world, with entrancing
characters and a riveting narrative that fits perfectly with the
historical facts.
*JOHN MAN, author of Genghis Khan*
Lesley Downer has pulled off a remarkable achievement in making the
beautiful, strange and dangerous world of one woman in a
19th-century Japan facing Western invasion utterly believable, and
utterly gripping.
*VANORA BENNETT, author of Portrait of an Unknown Woman*
Atsu is what we all want to be: a courageous woman of heartbreaking
intelligence… set against our own darkest selves. This tale of
western imperialism has so many resonances in the modern world,
written with passion, depth and brilliance, and a sense of time and
place that is earning Lesley Downer a reputation as the Shogun’s
Writer for the twenty first century.
*MANDA SCOTT, bestselling author of the Boudica novels*
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