The Pure Land
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The year is 1858. Thomas Glover is a gutsy eighteen-year-old who grasps the chance of escape to foreign lands and takes a posting as a trader in Japan. Within ten years he amasses a great fortune, learns the ways of the samurai, and, on the other side of the law, brings about the overthrow of the Shogun. Yet beneath Glover's astonishing success lies a man cut to the heart. His love affair with a courtesan - a woman who, unknown to him, would bear him the son for which he had always longed - would form a tragedy so dramatic as to be immortalised in the stories behind Madame Butterfly and Miss Saigon.
The Pure Land relives in fiction the arc of Glover's true-life rise and fall, and forges a hundred-year saga that culminates in the annihilation of Nagasaki in 1945.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Scottish writer Spence (Stone Garden) fictionalizes the life of Thomas Glover, a 19th-century Scots entrepreneur who built a mercantile empire in Japan, and whose life inspired Madame Butterfly and Miss Saigon. In 1858, the young Glover, son of a coast guard officer, works as a clerk in Scotland. He lives with his family, but longs to see the world, and takes a job in Japan with Jardine, Mathieson & Co., a British trading house. Soon, Glover is also working as an independent trader in arms and opium, among other things. As he forms connections with a number of different Japanese clans, Glover falls in love with a courtesan, and the consequences last for generations. He also slowly gets wrapped up in the fate of Japan, as the country makes the transition away from a feudalism fraught with clan violence. Spence opens this lively and epic historical narrative in 1945, at the moment of the U.S. bombing of Nagasaki. Thoughtful and vivid, the novel adds rich detail to a life known mostly in broad strokes.
