The year is 1853, and Japan teeters on the brink of turmoil.
Growing up among the samurai of the Satsuma clan, the beautiful, headstrong Okatsu had – like all the clan’s women – been encouraged to be bold, taught to wield the halberd and to ride a horse. But then the black ships appear. Bristling with cannon and manned by strangers who to Japanese eyes are barbarians, their arrival threatens Japan’s very existence. And turns Okatsu’s world upside down.
For her feudal lord has chosen her for a very special role. She has been given a new name – Princess Atsu – and a new destiny: to save the realm. Her journey takes her to Edo Castle, a place so secret that it cannot be marked on any map. And there in the Women’s Palace – a place where only one man may enter – she seems doomed to end her days. But behind the palace’s immaculate facade, amid rumours of murders and whispers of ghosts, Atsu must unearth one last secret – the secret of the man whose fate is, it seems, irrevocably linked to hers: the Shogun himself …
Based on the remarkable true story of a woman who sacrificed everything – love, loyalty and maybe life itself – in a bid to save her world, The Shogun’s Queen is epic, romantic historical fiction at its finest.
