From a Far Land

Julia Pavernen arrives in Shanghai in 1921 as the guest of her Bryn Mawr friend Emily Howe and is absorbed into the privileged world of Emily’s wealthy Chinese family. She falls in love with Emily’s brother Tommy, works for political and humanitarian causes and encounters the city’s merchants, gun-runners, journalists, refugees and revolutionaries. Emily’s own rejection of an arranged marriage draws her into an unequal relationship with an American correspondent.

Spanning three turbulent decades, the novel carries Julia and the Howe family through warlord rule, Nationalist consolidation, Japanese occupation, civil war and the Communist victory of 1949. The closing movement in 1952 confronts the destruction of foreign privilege and the exclusion of Western residents from the new People’s Republic, making Shanghai’s transformation inseparable from the characters’ divided political and personal loyalties.