Shanghai Station
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
High adventure and romance in the most exciting city in the world, the crucible of East and West—Shanghai Station is the story of a young Russian aristocrat, Alexander Karlov, who flees the Communist revolution of 1917 only to find himself in a turbulent, exotic life of passion and violence and revenge.
Shanghai is in turmoil. Warlords, Triads, Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang and the young Communist party of Mao Tse-tung are fighting for mastery of the world's fourth largest city, even as the European colonial powers still control the center of Shanghai with their own police and corrupt administrations and Japan is turning its ambitions towards China. The brutal Soviet agent Viktor Polyak is hunting White Russians like the Karlovs and manipulating young Jessica James, the lovely but naive daughter of American missionaries who is conflicted by her attachments to both Alexander Karlov and to revolution.
Vengeance inhabits Alexander's soul as he hunts the Red agent who has killed his parents and abducted his sister. In a world of bordellos and opium dens, race tracks and European clubs, it also entangles him in perilous alliances—with the Cossack hetman Ivan Semyonov; with Mei-lan, a woman who knows Shanghai's darkest secrets; with "Big Ear," leader of the city's most powerful Triad; with the French police; and with a spirited young American who calls herself Jesse James.
A masterful storyteller at the top of his form, Bartle Bull follows the success of his popular African novels A Café on the Nile and The Devil's Oasis with this equally rousing and romantic tale of historical adventure, political terror and personal revenge set dramatically against the backdrop of China's teeming port city of Shanghai.
Praise for Bartle Bull
“Good fun, and considerably more intelligent entertainment than is customarily dished out by the robotic hacks whose novels find their way onto the bestsellers list.”
—Washington Post
"Bartle Bull brilliantly brings to life post-WWI Shanghai.
Great tale from a great writer."
—Forbes
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Shifting his setting from Caf on the Nile's mid-1930s Africa, Bull is back with another bloody good atmospheric (and frankly erotic) historic swashbuckler, this time set in Shanghai at the end of WWI. Fleeing the Bolsheviks in September 1918, 17-year-old Alexander Karlov and his mother and twin sister abandon their vast Russian estate (where five generations of his family have bred and trained black chargers for the czars) and take the Trans-Siberian railway 4,000 miles east to the port of Vladivostok, intending to reunite with Count Karlov, Alexander's soldier/father. When the train is attacked by Bolsheviks and Alexander's leg is broken, he must look helplessly on as his mother is murdered and his sister kidnapped by ruthless commissar Viktor Polyak. Taking their prize horses, Alexander and his father escape Vladivostok on a freighter just ahead of the Bolsheviks, looking to make a new life in exotic Shanghai. There, Mao Zedong and Soviet agent Mikhail Borodin are urging the downtrodden Chinese peasants to revolution, and Jessica James, 18, the impressionable daughter of passive missionaries, has come under Mao's thrall. Alexander barely sets foot on shore when, in rapid-fire order, he succumbs to the charms of his rich cousin's wanton mistress, rescues Shanghai's most infamous madam and helps his father establish Salle d'Armes, a riding and fencing school all this before he meets Jesse, becomes a racing jockey and gets revenge on Polyak. Typical of Bull's sweeping epics, this unflinchingly gory yarn evokes the sights, sounds, tastes and scents of a splendidly decadent era.
