The Pure Land resurrects the dramatic life of Thomas Glover, the Scottish businessman who helped overthrow the shogun and whose tumultuous love affairs inspired the opera Madame Butterfly and the musical Miss Saigon. Alan Spence has transformed this true story into an unforgettable hundred-year saga that culminates in the annihilation of Nagasaki. Thomas Glover is a gutsy eighteen-year-old in Aberdeen in 1858 who grasps the chance of escape to foreign lands and takes a posting as a trader in Japan. Within ten years he amasses a great fortune, helps to modernize Japan, and, on the other side of the law, brings about the overthrow of the shogun. Yet beneath Glover's astonishing success lies a man cut to the heart. His love affair with a courtesan-a woman who, unknown to him, would bear him the son for whom he had always longed-would form a tragedy so heartrending that the story became immortal. Called "a page-turner of the first order . . . an engaging and vivid historical novel, but also a meditative work of art” by The Times of London, The Pure Land is a modern epic, a rattling good adventure, a devastating love story, and a journey of the spirit.
