An Exquisite Sense of What is Beautiful

A sweeping novel of East and West, love and war, truths and denials.

An eminent British writer returns to the resort hotel in the Japanese mountains where he once spent a beautiful, snowed-in winter. It was there he fell in love and wrote his best-selling novel, The Waterwheel, accusing America of being in denial about the horrific aftermath of the Tokyo firebombings and the nuclear destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As we learn more about his earlier life, however - a student in Bloomsbury, involved with a famous American painter - we realise that he too is in denial, trying to escape past events that are now rapidly catching up with him.

J. David Simons is a former lawyer and lecturer at universities in Japan and the UK and is the author of two novels, short stories and essays. His first novel, The Credit Draper, was shortlisted for the McKitterick Prize, and he has received bursaries and writing fellowships from three prestigious organisations. Having spent many years travelling the world, he now lives in Glasgow, the city of his birth.