Lesley Downer is one of the most unusual authors writing in English. Years ago, determined to become an expert on the Japanese geisha, ultra-sophisticated entertainers and hostesses who are neither prostitutes nor courtesans, she became a Kyoto geisha herself and wrote Geisha: The Secret History of a Vanishing World.
Now she has written her second novel (the first being The Last Concubine), the story of Hana, a young samurai wife in the late 1860s.
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