The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure
Summary
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The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure by Adam Williams
A group of foreigners in the northeastern town of Shishan finds the status quo upset when Helen Frances, a young woman with a middle class upbringing but a fatal flaw, arrives and falls in love with the Hon Henry Manners. The most astonishing range of characters awaits you in this novel; the wicked brothel-keeper Madam Liu and her sadistic son Ren Ren; the pragmatic missionary Dr Airton, the American zealot Septimus Harding, the equivocal Mandarin. Not to mention the wonderfully complicated anti-hero Henry Manners, the prostitutes Fan Yimei and Shen Ping, the Mongolian shaman. And the ingenue, Helen Frances herself, whose innocence covers an unorthodox curiosity.
James Clavell left a huge gap in Far Eastern epic storytelling on his death in 1993 and, 10 years on, it looks as if he finally has a fitting successor with the appearance of Williams's novel on the Boxer rebellion of 1900Beijing-based Williams, an Englishman with a long family history in China, convincingly gathers under thunder-clouds, real and implied, his cast of western missionaries, railway builders, Chinese functionaries and a newly arrived English girl. Soon all their lives will be irrevocably changed, including that of conniving Mother Liu and her torture-inflicting son who run the brothel after which the book is named. Williams intermingles romance, peril and murder in the old China and spikes it with emotion and a spirit of adventure. Heavenly pleasure indeed!
The son of a Hong Kong Taipan whose family has been in China since the 1880s, Adam Williams was born and raised in Asia. Adam has undertaken an expedition by camel into the heart of the Taklamaken Desert to seek the lost cities of the Silk Road, and having survived this, competed in the 'Rhino Charge'. He is representative for a Far Eastern trading and services conglomerate, and lives in Beijing with his wife and two children. He is also an OBE.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780340827864 |
| ISBN 10 | 0340827866 |
| Title | The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure |
| Author | Adam Williams |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Hodder & Stoughton |
| Year published | 2003-08-11 |
| Number of pages | 720 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |