The three met in the aftermath of San Francisco''s devastating 1906 earthquake--the Mandarin Lai Tsin, a runaway American heiress, and a young Englishwoman. Against all odds they made their dreams come true, building one of the world''s largest trading companies and most luxurious hotels... They had only each other--and bloody secrets to bury even as they rose to dizzying heights, wary of love yet vulnerable to passion in its most dangerous forms... The Mandarin would pass his multi-billion-dollar empire only to the women in the Lai Tsin dynasty--along with one last devastating truth....

Sweeping from the turn of the century through the 1960''s, from the Orient to San Francisco and New York, Elizabeth Adler has written a magnificent novel of new wealth and old privilege, family passions and secret shame, of women surviving, triumphant, in the riveting saga of romantic intrigue.


From the Paperback edition.

The three met in the aftermath of San Francisco''s devastating 1906 earthquake--the Mandarin Lai Tsin, a runaway American heiress, and a young Englishwoman. Against all odds they made their dreams come true, building one of the world''s largest trading companies and most luxurious hotels... They had only each other--and bloody secrets to bury even as they rose to dizzying heights, wary of love yet vulnerable to passion in its most dangerous forms... The Mandarin would pass his multi-billion-dollar empire only to the women in the Lai Tsin dynasty--along with one last devastating truth....

Sweeping from the turn of the century through the 1960''s, from the Orient to San Francisco and New York, Elizabeth Adler has written a magnificent novel of new wealth and old privilege, family passions and secret shame, of women surviving, triumphant, in the riveting saga of romantic intrigue.


From the Paperback edition.