1868. In Japan's exotic pleasure quarters, sex is for sale and the only forbidden fruit is love ...
Hana is just seventeen when her husband goes to war, leaving her alone and vulnerable. When enemy soldiers attack her house she flees across the shattered city of Tokyo and takes refuge in the Yoshiwara, its famous pleasure-quarters.There she is forced to become a courtesan.
Yozo, brave, loyal and a brilliant swordsman, is pledged to the embattled shogun. He sails to the frozen north to join his rebel comrades for a desperate last stand. Defeated, he makes his way south to the only place where a man is beyond the reach of the law - the Yoshiwara.
There in the Nightless City where three thousand courtesans mingle with...
Lesley Downer is an author, journalist and historian. She has written four novels, The Shogun Quartet, set in the glittering world of nineteenth-century Japan. She has also written several works of non-fiction, including Geisha: The Remarkable Truth Behind the Fiction and The Brothers: The Hidden World of Japan's Richest Family, which was chosen as a New York Times Book of the Year. She lives in London with her husband, the author Arthur I. Miller.
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