"A wonderful refreshing and well written book. [...] There are excellent detailed descriptions to events, scenes, and settings and the characters are well researched and very well defined.This is an amazing and fascinating historical fiction that will surely please all historical buffs." Stella, book#1, Goodreads
The Song of the Wild Geese (#1)
Terue. The girl who was plucked from obscurity to become the most sought after geisha in Edo’s Floating World. The geisha who was so beautiful and talented that one of the richest nobles in Japan desired her as his wife.
But Terue wanted more from life, and was willing to risk everything to get it. Pregnant with her lover’s child and knowing that the disgrace would mean certain death for both her and her unborn child, Terue makes the devastating choice to flee Japan on the day her daughter – Kazhua, The Geisha with the Green Eyes – was born and changes both their destinies forever.
EXCERPT
It would not be truthful to say I do not remember my mother. My family. Of course I do. It is just that their memory is dull somehow. Perhaps the best way I can describe it is to say that they seem to me as if I am looking at them through a silken screen. They are there. I can see their features, but they are slightly blurred somehow. Not quite real.
Of course, many people would say that I am confused. That the life I led with my family was real, and each day since I left them has been the dream. But they do not know. They cannot be expected to understand.
I think my mother was a pretty woman. She always seemed so to me, at any rate. And my father never took a concubine, so he must also have found her pleasing. Of course, we were poor, so it may be that he simply could not afford a concubine rather than a matter of choice. But I don’t recollect Mother ever complaining that he spent money they didn’t have on courtesans—or even common whores—so perhaps he was a contented man, after all.
Not that I understood about concubines or courtesans in those days. I was a mere child, the only daughter in a family of five brothers. It may have been simple neglect. After all, what was the point of trying to teach a mere girl anything about life, or anything else for that matter? But I was soon to learn differently.
In fact, I began to learn the day that my new life began.
In Japan, it is widely believed that everyone’s life is bound by the red thread of their fate. The thread connects to all those we come in contact with throughout our lives. Thus, each path in life is predestined.
Terue knows this. Just as she knows that one day her red thread will guide her to Kazhua, the daughter she was forced to abandon on the day of her birth in Edo’s Floating World. But before she can find Kazhua, fate has much in store for Terue.
Following her new husband, Lord Kyle, from the Highlands of Scotland to fight in the Crimea, Terue serves as a nurse, witnessing the horrors of the battlefield.
Injured, kidnapped, and assumed dead, Terue must face the possibility that she might never see her beloved daughter or husband again…
The war in the Crimea is over. Delighted to be reunited with her husband, Lord Kyle, Terue thinks she will soon be home again in her beloved Scottish Highlands.
But fate is not finished with her yet.
Terue learns that her daughter is a geisha in Edo. Overjoyed at the chance to be reunited with her child again, she and her husband set out to find Kazhua, returning to where Terue’s life began in the Floating World.
But old dangers and new foes abound.
Forced to live in hiding, finding Kazhua without revealing Terue’s true identity proves more difficult than they expected. Terue is so close to finding her daughter, she can feel the red thread that binds them together pulling taught. But reaching out to Kazhua could put all their lives at risk.
About the author:
I started my career in the heavy industry of British Gas and ended it in the rarefied atmosphere of the British Library. Now, I share a blissful early retirement on the wonderful Costa Blanca, living in a male dominated household with my long suffering husband, a cat and a dog.
Author's Giveaway
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