A powerful historical novel based on the remarkable life of the man who inspired 'Madame Butterfly'
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 a 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. The novel gracefully spans the feudal and the atomic ages, East and West, global history and private passion.
