Anya Kozlova lives with her parents in Harbin, a Chinese
city to which Russian nobles fled during the Revolution.
The White Russians bring wealth, building fine homes.
WHITE
GARDENIA starts after Anya's father dies. China, newly
communist, has been invaded by the Japanese, and
foreigners
have no protection.
The Japanese invaded Nanking brutally and without
restraint. They've taken over a Russian-owned cotton
factory. Now Anya's mother is instructed to give lodging
to
a general. She can't refuse. The Chinese hate her for
this,
and when Soviet troops arrive to repel the Japanese, Anya
is taken back to work in Soviet Russia while her mother is
sent to prison. But family friends help Anya to escape to
capitalist, American-filled Shanghai, where she begins
life
as a young woman.
Some descriptions are not for the tender, between wars,
occupations and opium addiction, as well as forced
removals
to Siberian work camps. By contrast the delights of
Shanghai after the Second World War are an assault on the
senses, with silks, spices, crowds, monkeys, beggars and
rich foods. Anya sticks stubbornly to her own culture,
reading Proust and Gorky, while speaking Mandarin to those
around her. She finds a little Russian enclave here. A
young man, Dmitri, takes her to a nightclub. He's well off
because he works for gangsters and club owners. But could
he be her future?
Civil war overtakes Shanghai as communists advance, and
there are scenes of execution to add to the turbulence.
The
life of a refugee, a typhoon and dispersal of the White
Russians to Australia among other places, continues the
turmoil. Anya changes identity a few times, trying to be
true to herself but forced by circumstances to start again
with a new language and new friends. She never knows who
she can trust or what work she will be given next.
If your knowledge of this period and place has a few gaps,
the well-researched WHITE GARDENIA will provide plenty of
background, the good and the bad. Belinda Alexandra must
have found the book both difficult and compelling to
write,
as she based it on family memories. Anyone reading Anya's
story as she travels full circle, finding love, betrayal
and good hearts, would find it hard to remain unaffected.
We can apply lessons to our treatment of present-day
refugees. This dramatic historical novel will leave you in
awe of the generation of war survivors.
From internationally bestselling author Belinda Alexandra
comes a sweeping, emotional journey that “depicts vividly
the powerful lifelong bond between mothers and daughters”
(Paullina Simons, author of The Bronze Horseman).
In a district of the city of Harbin, a haven for White
Russian families since Russia’s Communist Revolution, Alina
Kozlova must make a heartbreaking decision if her only
child, Anya, is to survive the final days of World War II.
White Gardenia sweeps across cultures and continents,
from the glamorous nightclubs of Shanghai to the austerity
of Cold War Soviet Russia in the 1960s, from a desolate
island in the Pacific Ocean to a new life in post-war
Australia. Both mother and daughter must make sacrifices,
but is the price too high? Most importantly of all, will
they ever find each other again?
Rich in historical detail and reminiscent of stories by Kate
Morton and Lucinda Riley, White Gardenia is a
compelling and beautifully written tale about yearning,
longing, and the lengths a mother will go to protect her child.
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