The year is 1858. Thomas Glover is a gutsy eighteen-year-old who grasps the chance of escape to foreign lands and takes a posting as a trader in Japan. Within ten years he amasses a great fortune, learns the ways of the samurai, and, on the other side of the law, brings about the overthrow of the Shogun. Yet beneath Glover’s astonishing success lies a man cut to the heart. His love affair with a courtesan – a woman who, unknown to him, would bear him the son for which he had always longed – would form a tragedy so dramatic as to be immortalised in the stories behind Madame Butterfly and Miss Saigon.
The Pure Land relives in fiction the arc of Glover’s true-life rise and fall, and forges a hundred-year saga that culminates in the annihilation of Nagasaki in 1945.
Om författaren
Alan Spence is an award-winning poet, playwright, novelist and short story writer and is the author of six works of fiction, six collections of poetry and six plays. His awards include the Glenfiddich Award, The People’s Prize, Macallan Short Story Prize and Mc Vitie Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year. He is Professor Emeritus in Creative Writing at the University of Aberdeen where he founded the annual WORD Festival in 1999 and was its Artistic Director for twelve years. With his wife he runs the Sri Chinmoy Meditation Centre in Edinburgh. In 2017 he was appointed Edinburgh Makar, the Poet Laureate for the City.