Shanghai Station - Softcover

Bull, Bartle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0786714867 ISBN 13: 9780786714865

Publisher: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004

Synopsis

A masterful storyteller at the top of his form, Bartle Bull follows the successes of his popular Africa trilogy—A Café on the Nile, The White Rhino Hotel, and The Devil's Oasis—with a rousing historical adventure. Shanghai Station is a compelling tale of political terror and personal vengeance that unfolds in 1918 in China's colorful, turbulent port city of Shanghai. Well-born Alexander Karlov arrives in Shanghai with a mission, for the Bolsheviks have brutally killed his mother and abducted his twin sister. Vengeance commands Alexander's soul. It also entangles him in perilous alliances—with the Cossack hit man Ivan Semyonov; with Mei-lan, a woman who knows Shanghai's darkest secrets; with "Big Ear," leader of the city's most powerful Triad; with the French police; and with a spirited young American woman who calls herself Jesse James.

About this title

About the Author

Bartle Bull was born in London and educated at Harvard University and Magdalen College, Oxford. A student of Africa for over thirty years, he is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a member of the Explorers Club. A former publisher of The Village Voice, Bull wrote an environmental column for the Voice and later for the Natural Resources Defense Council. He is the author of the widely praised novels, The White Rhino Hotel, A Café on the Nile, The Devil's Oasis, Shanghai Station and China Star.

From Publishers Weekly

Shifting his setting from Cafe on the Nile's mid-1930s Africa, Bull is back with another bloody good atmospheric (and frankly erotic) historic swashbuckler, this time set in Shanghai at the end of WWI. Fleeing the Bolsheviks in September 1918, 17-year-old Alexander Karlov and his mother and twin sister abandon their vast Russian estate (where five generations of his family have bred and trained black chargers for the czars) and take the Trans-Siberian railway 4,000 miles east to the port of Vladivostok, intending to reunite with Count Karlov, Alexander's soldier/father. When the train is attacked by Bolsheviks and Alexander's leg is broken, he must look helplessly on as his mother is murdered and his sister kidnapped by ruthless commissar Viktor Polyak. Taking their prize horses, Alexander and his father escape Vladivostok on a freighter just ahead of the Bolsheviks, looking to make a new life in exotic Shanghai. There, Mao Zedong and Soviet agent Mikhail Borodin are urging the downtrodden Chinese peasants to revolution, and Jessica James, 18, the impressionable daughter of passive missionaries, has come under Mao's thrall. Alexander barely sets foot on shore when, in rapid-fire order, he succumbs to the charms of his rich cousin's wanton mistress, rescues Shanghai's most infamous madam and helps his father establish Salle d'Armes, a riding and fencing school-all this before he meets Jesse, becomes a racing jockey and gets revenge on Polyak. Typical of Bull's sweeping epics, this unflinchingly gory yarn evokes the sights, sounds, tastes and scents of a splendidly decadent era.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Carroll & Graf Publishers
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0786714867
• ISBN 13: 9780786714865
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 394