Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
March 2014
On Sale: March 4, 2014
288 pages ISBN: 0547516177 EAN: 9780547516172 Kindle: B00E78ICAG Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
In 1936, classical pianist Thomas Greene is recruited to
Shanghai to lead a jazz orchestra of fellow African-American
expats. From being flat broke in segregated Baltimore to
living in a mansion with servants of his own, he becomes the
toast of a city obsessed with music, money, pleasure and
power, even as it ignores the rising winds of
war.
Song Yuhua is refined, educated, and bonded
since age eighteen to Shanghai’s most powerful crime boss in
payment for her father’s gambling debts. Outwardly
submissive, she burns with rage and risks her life spying on
her master for the Communist Party.
Only when
Shanghai is shattered by the Japanese invasion do Song and
Thomas find their way to each other. Though their union is
forbidden, neither can back down from it in the turbulent
years of occupation and resistance that follow. Torn between
music and survival, freedom and commitment, love and world
war, they are borne on an irresistible riff of melody and
improvisation to Night in Shanghai’s final,
impossible choice.
In this impressively researched
novel, Nicole Mones not only tells the forgotten story of
black musicians in the Chinese Jazz age, but also weaves in
a stunning true tale of Holocaust heroism little-known in
the West.
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