Butterfly's Shadow
  • Published: 15 July 2011
  • ISBN: 9780099542179
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $29.99
Categories:

Butterfly's Shadow

Formats & editions
EBook
1 Sep 2010
Paperback
15 Jul 2011
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In the tradition of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, a sweeping and affecting novel that takes Puccini's much loved Madame Butterfly as its dramatic starting point.

Lee Langley's bewitching story of lost hope and thwarted love opens where Puccini's opera ends; with Madame Butterfly - Cho-Cho-San - handing over her beloved son to his American father before killing herself. In America Joey grows up torn between two cultures, haunted, like his parents, by their memories of what really happened on that fateful day.

But just as Joey's fate is inextricably linked with the country of his birth, so too is the fate of America, and both of their paths will ultimately lead to Nagasaki.
  • Published: 15 July 2011
  • ISBN: 9780099542179
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $29.99
Categories:

About the author

Lee Langley

Lee Langley is the author of nine highly praised novels including Changes of Address (shortlisted for the Hawthornden Prize) and Persistent Rumours (winner of a Commonwealth Writers' prize). Her most recent book was A Conversation on the Quai Voltaire, a volume of short stories, poetry and journalism. Her adaptation 'The Tenth Man', based on a Graham Greene story, was made into an award-winning movie starring Anthony Hopkins and Derek Jacobi. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in London.

Also by Lee Langley

A Conversation on the Quai Voltaire
Distant Music
False Pretences
See all

Praise for Butterfly's Shadow

A lovely novel... fragile and beautiful and so finely wrought

Ruth Padel

Lee Langley's big, ambitious new novel is a riveting read... and a deeply moving human story

Deborah Moggach

Langley's detailed descriptions of war blaze with brilliance

Arifa Akbar, Independent

A compelling portrait of a man in search of his lost self

Nick Rennison, Sunday Times

Beautifully written and vividly imagined, this is an impressive achievement

Jessica Mann, Literary Review

Her fiction often depicts an interplay of past and present, and here it is used to stunning effect

Sarah Lawson, The Tablet

The style is graceful and deliciously readable, and the novel ends with an unforgettably eerie and moving image'

Independent