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.