Flash House

A Los Angeles Times bestseller from the acclaimed author of Cloud Mountain!

"Liu has an eye for scenery and a feel for the details of period life in India."

-Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Flash House races forward into territory that, for most of us, is still almost entirely unknown. The result is an education wrapped in an adventure."

--Jack Miles,Pulitzer prize-winning author of God: A Biography

With phenomenal characterizations and exotic settings, Flash House tells a suspenseful tale of rescue and redemption set in Central Asia at the start of the Cold War, with two unforgettable heroines whose fates are irrevocably entwined.

In the expatriate world of New Delhi, India, 1949, Joanna Shaw is no ordinary American wife.  For one thing, she believes passionately in her journalist husband Aidan, even though her government accuses Aidan of harboring Communist sympathies.  For another, she is smitten by the strange and exotic culture to which the Shaws have fled to escape those accusations.  India both terrifies and entices Joanna, and she responds by immersing herself in one of the country's most vexing problems.  She directs a rescue home for wayward girls and becomes personally engaged in the fates of her charges, especially a bewitching blue-eyed hill child named Kamla who "claims her" in the lanes of Delhi's red-light district.  When Joanna receives word that her husband has disappeared during a routine news-gathering trip to Kashmir, this child becomes one of her pillars of strength.  The other is Aidan's best friend, an Australian historian named Lawrence Malcolm.  Together with Joanna's young son, Simon, this unlikely band sets off for the northernmost reaches of India, the last place Aidan was seen alive.

The ensuing journey leads over some of the highest mountain passes in the world and is by turns harrowing and heartbreaking, finally landing the rescuers in western China just weeks before the Communist takeover.  As one cruel revelation follows another, this surrogate family is forced to lean ever more heavily on each other for solace and for courage.  But will they be strong enough to endure the ultimate betrayal? 

Flash House is a tale of human frailty and resilience in a world where nothing is as it appears.