When Zofia’s beloved husband Haru is conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Army in 1941, she is left to navigate Japanese-occupied Shanghai alone. Far from home and surrounded by a country at war, Zofia finds unexpected comfort in a bond with Hilly, a spirited young refugee escaping Nazi-occupied Austria. As violence tightens its grip on the […]
Discovering Shanghai’s International Settlement
Shanghai, the ‘Pearl of the Orient’, was invaded by Japanese troops in 1941. The comfortable lives of the Westerners living in the city’s International Settlement were over. Deborah Swift looks back at the history of what happened, and her experiences of researching it for her latest novel, The Enemy’s Wife. At the end of my […]