My Last Empress
A Novel
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
A sweeping story of passion and obsession, set against the upheavals of nineteenth-century imperial China, by the New York Times bestselling author Da Chen
When Samuel Pickens’s great love tragically loses her life, Samuel travels the globe, Annabelle always on his mind. Eventually, he comes face-to-face with the mirror image of his obsession in the last place he would expect and must discover her secrets and decide how far he will go for a woman he loves.
Da Chen immerses the reader in the world of the Chinese imperial palace, filled with ghosts and grief, where bewitching concubines, treacherous eunuchs, and fierce warlords battle for supremacy. Chen takes us deeply into an epic saga of nineteenth-century China, where one man searches for his destiny and a forbidden love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chen's (Brothers) 19th-century tale of obsession explores the line between love and madness. After Samuel Pickens's first love, Annabelle, perishes in a fire a month into their adolescent romance, her spirit stays with him through Yale and beyond, an invisible partner who reigns over him. Later, an adult Pickens acquires a position as tutor to the teenage emperor of China's Qing Dynasty and travels to the country where his beloved spent her childhood. There, he finds a royal palace overrun with corrupt eunuchs and led by a callow and unprepared emperor. Pickens is soon befriended by his effeminate pupil, but the tutor becomes enamored with 13-year-old Empress Qiu Rong, fourth wife of the emperor and Annabelle's doppelg nger. Their ensuing perverse love affair is complicated by the schemes of various parties, but together they navigate the traps set for them, seeking assistance from a local warlord and other shady individuals. Steeped in the language and colors of an Asia long gone, this florid, Lolita-esque tale focuses too narrowly on the narrator's lost love and misses its potential to be a sweeping historical epic.
