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 the 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. Alan
Spence has produced a modern epic, at once a rattling good adventure,
a heart-wrenching love story and a journey of the spirit
