LoveReading Says
Drama, adventure, conflict, mysticism, jealousy and more. A wonderful sweeping epic set in medieval China about a group of women from the Emperor’s sister to a street beggar who form a powerful circle of allegiance.
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The Secrets of Jin Shei Synopsis
They are bound together by a declaration of loyalty that transcends all other vows, even those with the gods, by their own secret language, passed from mother to daughter, by the knowledge that some of them will have to pay the ultimate sacrifice to enable others to fulfil their destiny.
The sisterhood we meet run from the Emperor's sister to the street-beggar, from the trainee warrior in the Emperor's Guard to the apprentice healer, from the artist to the traveller-girl, herself an illegitimate daughter of an emperor and seen as a threat to the throne. And as one of them becomes Dragon Empress, her determination to hold power against the sages of the temple, against the marauding forces from other kingdoms, drags the sisterhood into a dangerous world of court intrigue, plot and counterplot, and brings them into conflict with each other from which only the one who remains true to all the vows she made at the very beginning to the dying Princess Empress can rescue them.
An amazing and unusual book, based on some historical fact, full of drama, adventure and conflict like a Shakespearean history play, it's a novel about kinship and a society of women, of mysticism, jealousy, fate, destiny, all set in the wonderful, swirling background of medieval China.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9780007163748 |
| Publication date: |
6th September 2004 |
| Author: |
Alma Alexander |
| Publisher: |
Harper Collins |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Primary Genre |
Historical Fiction
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| Other Genres: |
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About Alma Alexander
Alma Alexander is the pen name of Alma A. Hromic. She was born in 1963 in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia, on the shores of the river Danube. Her father's employment with international aid agencies meant that the family spent twenty years living in various countries in Africa, including Zambia, Swaziland, and South Africa.
Educated in the United Kingdom and South Africa, Hromic graduated from the University of Cape Town with an MSc in Microbiology in 1987. She quickly left the lab in order to write about it instead, and spent several years running a scientific journal for the Allergy Society of South Africa before she moved to New Zealand in 1994. She also worked as a literary critic for several publications in South Africa and England.
The first volume of her fantasy series, Changer of Days, was published in October 2001 by HarperCollins Voyager, and the second volume followed in May 2002. Her novel The Secrets of Jin-shei (as Alma Alexander) was published by HarperCollins in May 2004 in the U.S., and was also published in the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Italy, and Germany in a total of four languages.
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