One of Australia's favourite writers, Lian Hearn's books have sold over 400,000 copies in Australia, and over 4 million copies around the world. Lian Hearn, author of Tales of the Otori, returns with her lastest novel, BLOSSOMS AND SHADOWS.

JAPAN, 1857
For centuries Japan has been on its own; isolated by choice from the rest of the world. But the Western powers are now at its shores, its government is crumbling and revolution is building. The age of the samurai is ending and in its place a new Japan will be born.

Into this turmoil steps a young woman. Tsuru expects to marry a man of her parents' choice but her life is taken over by the beliefs of a new age and by the passionate men around her. Their slogan is sonnojoi (revere the Emporer, expel the foreigners), their preferred method is violence.

BLOSSOMS AND SHADOWS is a compelling and beautiful tale of love and war, women and men, and the rise of modern Japan.

In bookstores October 2010 (Australia).

 

Tales of the Otori News

It's over eight years since the publication of the first book Across the Nightingale Floor (2002). Since then the Tales of the Otori have been sold into 36 countries and have been world wide best sellers.

Film rights were sold before the first book was published to Universal Studios for Kennedy/Marshall. David Henry Hwang was assigned as script writer and the script is now in development.

The fifth and final book, Heaven's Net is Wide is now available. It goes back in time to relate the life of Lord Shigeru from the age of 12 (the year in which Takeo is born). Many of the subjects that are only hinted at in Across the Nightingale Floor - Shigeru's training with Matsuda Shingen, his first encounter with Iida Sadamu, the battle of Yaegahara, the role of Muto Shizuka, the meeting with Lady Maruyama - are narrated in full here, as well as a few other unexpected events. Heaven's Net is Wide finishes just before Across the Nightingale Floor begins, so the series has a circular shape. (You can go on reading it forever!)  

I started writing Across the Nightingale Floor with the four main characters in my head and the opening sentence in Takeo’s voice. I was in Akiyoshidai International Arts Village in Yamaguchi Prefecture; it was a damp, humid afternoon in September. The light was pale and opalescent. Water trickled from the pools around the artists’ residence, carp splashed and occasionally a kingfisher swooped above the pool. I was writing in a notebook with a black gel pen I’d bought in Himeji. I wrote ‘My mother used to threaten to tear me limb from limb.’ Later I changed this to ‘into eight pieces’. I like to occasionally use Japanese idioms translated literally to give the feeling that the book is not written in English...

"Peace comes at the price of bloodshed." This is part of a prophecy made in Grass For His Pillow. "Five battles will buy you peace, four to win and one to lose." The tension in my work is always between humans’ drive to power and their desire for peace.

My hero, Takeo, is born into a peaceful non-violent sect who follow the teaching that it is forbidden to take life, your own or any one else’s. But when his family is massacred and his village destroyed by a warlord, Takeo’s immediate instinct is for revenge...