In her first novel, author Lesley Downer explores her fascination with Japanese culture and history in a romanticized look at the end of the Tokugawa shogunate period. The story is certainly a ...

Lady Tsuguko too kept silence until they reached the princess's apartments. There she swept Sachi behind the screens and made her kneel, facing her. "Well, my dear," she said. "What a lucky girl you ...

Lesley Downer's debut novel is in all the right places. Clocking in at almost 500 pages, it has a whoppingly epic story to match, exploring love, betrayal, violence, prejudice and sex in 19th-century ...