The Winter Station
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4.7 • 6 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
An aristocratic Russian doctor races to contain a deadly plague in an outpost city in Manchuria - before it spreads to the rest of the world.
1910: people are mysteriously dying at an alarming rate in the Russian-ruled city of Kharbin, a major railway outpost in Northern China. Strangely, some of the dead bodies vanish before they can be identified.
During a dangerously cold winter in a city gripped by fear, the Baron, a wealthy Russian aristocrat and the city's medical commissioner, is determined to stop this mysterious plague. Battling local customs, an occupying army, and a brutal epidemic with no name, the Baron is torn between duty and compassion, between Western medical science and respect for Chinese tradition. His allies include a French doctor, a black marketeer, and a charismatic Chinese dwarf. His greatest refuge is the intimacy he shares with his young Chinese wife - but she has secrets of her own.
Based on a true story that has been lost to history, set during the last days of imperial Russia, The Winter Station is a richly textured and brilliant novel about mortality, fear and love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The outbreak of plague in Manchuria during the winter of 1910 1911 tests a Russian doctor's physical, emotional, and moral stamina in Shields's accomplished third novel (after The Fig Eater and The Crimson Portrait). When Chief Medical Examiner Baron Rozher Alexandrovich von Budberg learns that two bodies were whisked away from outside the Kharbin train station, he wonders why he wasn't notified. The czar's appointed administrator, Gen. Dmitry Khorvat, assures him the corpses were not Russian and so are of no importance, then asks him to investigate the death of a Russian businessman. The businessman's daughter describes her father coughing up blood before he died. Evidence mounts of a deadly epidemic made worse by a political cover-up. Matters worsen: a public-relations-minded Chinese epidemiologist breaks with tradition to conduct secret autopsies but refuses to shut down the railway during Chinese New Year; plague-wagons patrol the streets removing people who look sick; a doctor ignoring the baron's pleas to use masks, gloves, and disinfectant succumbs to contagion, as do countless others. Shields's Kharbin is plagued not only by disease but also by rumor, superstition, pride, and ignorance. This fictional portrait of a man caught in a real-life medical crisis proves affecting and timely in its exploration of conflicts between cultures and classes, ambition and mortality, science and politics.
Customer Reviews
A story that transcends time
Full disclosure: the author is a close friend of mine from college. That aside - this book aims high. Shields tells the compelling true story of a Russian doctor during the pneumonic plague in Manchuria in the early 20th century. The author was willing to take herself into the hellish circumstances of massive loss of life, secrets held by government officials, rivalries and ego battles between doctors to show us the example of one man who was a beacon of light in a worst case scenario - not unlike the civil breakdown and fear that we see in our world today. The story is beautifully told, and we learn how the Baron (the doctor) uses the art of calligraphy, his faith and the tea ceremony to stay grounded in the principles of ritual, compassion and empathy for one another. While this is a difficult book to read (nightmarish descriptions of fatalities, frozen bodies), in the end, it is a redemptive story of one man who is a beacon of light in a very very dark world. There is much to admire in the Baron’s story, and in Shields’ inspired writing.