Flash House
A Novel
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- 7,49 €
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- 7,49 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
From the acclaimed author of CLOUD MOUNTAIN comes a suspenseful novel of rescue and redemption set in Central Asia at the start of the Cold War, with two unforgettable heroines whose fates are irrevocably intertwined. When a plane carrying American journalist Aidan Shaw goes down in Kashmir in 1949, Aidan's wife Joanna refuses to accept that he is dead. Aidan has been accused of harboring Communist sympathies, and his mission to Kashmir was supposed to clear his name of these charges. Now Joanna is convinced that his disappearance involves more than accident. With Aidan's best friend and a mysterious native girl, Kamla, whom she has saved from an Indian brothel—or “flash house,” Joanna sets off for the northernmost reaches of India. The ensuing journey leads over some of the highest mountain passes in the world, finally landing the rescuers in western China just weeks before the Communist takeover—a world where nothing is as it appears.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in tumultuous post-WWII Asia, Liu's third novel (after Face and Cloud Mountain) is a sweeping espionage thriller that traces a woman's efforts to find her husband after he disappears into the back country of Communist China in 1949. Joanna Shaw, who runs a rescue agency for Asian prostitutes in New Delhi, offers asylum to a 10-year-old rape victim named Kamla. Shortly afterwards Joanna is notified that her husband, Aidan, a journalist who has been targeted by J. Edgar Hoover for alleged Communist sympathies, has gone missing after a plane crash in Kashmir. Convinced that Aidan is alive, Joanna sets off with her husband's friend, Malcolm Lawrence, and Kamla as their interpreter to find Aidan, but their quest hits a dead end after they discover the body of the female journalist with whom Aidan apparently was traveling. As her prospects of locating Aidan fade, Joanna begins an affair with Malcolm, but soon learns that her new lover had a key role with Aidan in an espionage operation, as a result of which Aidan may have defected to China. Liu tracks the shifting alliances of Aidan, Joanna and Malcolm with surefooted storytelling and solid characterization, and introduces layers of suspense rooted in provocative political secrets. The ending is a crescendo of bittersweet revelations, in which Liu's ability to probe issues of East versus West rises to a new level.
