1868. In Japan's exotic pleasure quarters, sex is for sale and the only forbidden fruit is love ...

Hana is just seventeen when her husband goes to war, leaving her alone and vulnerable. When enemy soldiers attack her house she flees across the shattered city of Tokyo and takes refuge in the Yoshiwara, its famous pleasure-quarters.There she is forced to become a courtesan.

Yozo, brave, loyal and a brilliant swordsman, is pledged to the embattled shogun. He sails to the frozen north to join his rebel comrades for a desperate last stand. Defeated, he makes his way south to the only place where a man is beyond the reach of the law - the Yoshiwara.

There in the Nightless City where three thousand courtesans mingle with geishas and jesters, the battered fugitive meets the beautiful courtesan. But each has a secret so terrible that once revealed it will threaten their very lives ...

An epic story of forbidden love in a time of war by the author of The Last Concubine, one of the bestselling hardcover debuts of 2008.

About the Author

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.

Reviews
Vividly narrated...I believed in this engrossing story and felt my insides quake as Hana approached her inevitable fate -- Jonathan Mirsky * THE SPECTATOR *



Book Information
ISBN 9780552155328
Author Lesley Downer
Format Paperback
Page Count 480
Imprint Corgi Books
Publisher Transworld Publishers Ltd
Weight(grams) 325g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 127mm * 28mm