A fisherman's daughter in 1930s Japan rises to become a famous geisha. After training, Sayuri's virginity is sold to the highest bidder, then the school finds her a general for a patron. When he dies, she is reunited with the only man she loved.

Sweeping from 1930s Shanghai to present day Paris, China Dawn encompasses upheavals of war, intrigues of business, intimate desires and sufferings of the human heart.

"A bestselling, prizewinning novel of obsession and psychological intrigue about two enigmatic unmarried women, one of whom manipulates the other from afar, by one of Japan's most acclaimed young writers"--

"Japan, 1957. Seventeen-year-old Naoko Nakamura's prearranged marriage to the son of her father's business associate would secure her family's status in their traditional Japanese community, but Naoko has fallen for another man--an American sailor, a gaijin--and to marry him would bring great shame upon her entire family. When it's learned Naoko carries the sailor's child, she's cast out in disgrace and forced to make unimaginable choices with consequences...

When the pandemic hits, Kristofer is forced to shutter his successful restaurant in Reykjavik, sending him into a spiral of uncertainty, even as his memory seems to be failing. But an uncanny bolt from the blue, a message from Miko Nakamura, a woman whom he'd known in the sixties when they were students in London, both inspires and rattles him, as he is drawn inexorably back into a love story that has marked him for life. Even as the pandemic upends...