Russian Concubine

The Russian Concubine series follows the Ivanova family across the collapse of imperial Russia, exile in China and the revolutionary politics of the early Soviet period. The Jewel of St Petersburg provides the family's prehistory in 1910, when Valentina Ivanova is still part of St Petersburg's aristocratic world and the pressures that will destroy the old order are already visible.

The Russian Concubine moves the story to northern China in 1928, where Valentina and her daughter Lydia live as refugees amid foreign privilege, Chinese nationalism and Communist resistance. The Concubine’s Secret then carries Lydia back towards Stalin's Soviet Union while Chang An Lo remains caught in the Chinese revolutionary struggle. Together the novels connect family exile and romance with the political upheavals that transformed Russia and China in the first decades of the twentieth century.