Purchase
Dutton
September 2015
On Sale: September 8, 2015
Featuring: Sai Jinhua
400 pages
ISBN: 0525955135
EAN: 9780525955139
Kindle: B013WNXPUI
Hardcover / e-Book
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Historical
A timeless novel of one woman who bridged two worlds in a
tumultuous era of East meets West
The
Courtesan is an astonishing tale inspired by the
real life of a woman who lived and loved in the
extraordinary twilight decades of the Qing dynasty. To this
day, Sai Jinhua is a legend in her native land of China, and
this is her story, told the way it might have
been.
The year is 1881. Seven-year-old Jinhua is left
an orphan, alone and unprotected after her mandarin father’s
summary execution for the crime of speaking the truth. For
seven silver coins, she is sold to a brothel-keeper and
subjected to the worst of human nature. Will the private
ritual that is her father’s legacy and the wise friendship
of the crippled brothel maid be enough to sustain
her?
When an elegant but troubled scholar takes
Jinhua as his concubine, she enters the close world of his
jealous first wife. Yet it is Jinhua who accompanies him--as
Emissary to the foreign devil nations of Prussia,
Austro-Hungary, and Russia--on an exotic journey to Vienna.
As he struggles to play his part in China's early,
blundering diplomatic engagement with the western world,
Jinhua’s eyes and heart are opened to the irresistible
possibilities of a place that is mesmerizing and strange,
where she will struggle against the constraints of
tradition and her husband’s authority and seek to find
“Great Love.”
Sai Jinhua is an altered woman when she
returns to a changed and changing China, where a
dangerous clash of cultures pits East against West. The
moment arrives when Jinhua’s western sympathies will
threaten not only her own survival, but the survival of
those who are most dear to her.
A book that
shines a small light on the large history of China’s
relationship with the West, The
Courtesan is a novel that distills, with the
economy of a poem, a woman’s journey of untold miles to
discern what is real and abiding.
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