The Yellow Emperor's Cure - Tapa blanda

Basu keeps us intrigued by his hero and by the exotic world that creates and destroys him * The Sunday Times * Febrile, fast-moving, violent and occasionally gruesome, The Yellow Emperor's Cure is as morbidly fascinating as the disease on which it is predicated * Times Literary Supplement * A wonderful and compellingly visual novel, whose world is as completely realised as anything by Robert Graves, Amitav Ghosh or Barry Unsworth -- William Dalrymple

Lisbon, 1898: philandering surgeon Antonio Maria discovers his father is dying of syphilis, scourge of both rich and poor. Desperate to find a cure, he sets sail for Peking. But Antonio encounters the alluring Fumi, and finds a woman he cannot leave behind. As he wrestles with his disbelief in irrational Chinese views about illness, and helplessly falls into an erotic obsession with Fumi, violence breaks out across China. Antonio must decide whether to flee or stay in China and discover for himself if the cure he has been chasing is merely a myth.