Inspired by real historical events, this utterly engrossing sweeping historical novel blends fact and fiction, suspense and sensuality in an epic story of love at a time of war. It will have you hooked from page one. Lesley Downer's debut novel, The Last Concubine, was one of the biggest selling debuts of 2008 and was shortlist for the Pure Passion awards. She is also the author of Geisha: the Secret History of a Vanishing World.
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.
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.She lived there for a total of some fifteen years.It has been an ongoing love affair.
She has written many books about the country and its culture.To research Geisha: The Secret History of a Vanishing World, she lived among the geisha and little by little found herself being transformed into one of them. Madame Sadayakko: The Geisha who Seduced the West, is the story of the turn-of-the-century Japanese actress who was the model for Puccini’s Madame Butterfly.
Lesley 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. The Last Concubine is her first novel.
