Sometimes the end of a love affair is only the beginning...It is 1952 and newlywed Claire Pendleton has just arrived in Hong Kong with her civil - servant husband, Martin. She takes a position as piano teacher to Locket Chen, the daughter of wealthy socialite Chinese parents, and soon becomes intrigued by the family's enigmatic English driver, Will Truesdale. This fascination becomes an affair, but it is one interwoven with flashbacks to the early 1940s, during Hong Kong's swift fall to the Japanese, and glimpses of another woman - Trudy Liang, a beautiful Eurasian with secrets of her own. As the threads of this spellbinding novel intertwine and converge, a landscape of impossible choices emerges - between love and safety, courage and survival, the present and, above all, the past.
