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Lust, Caution
Lust, Caution
Oct 11, 2024 2:18 AM

Author:Eileen Chang

Lust, Caution

In 1940s Shanghai, beautiful young Jiazhi spends her days playing mahjong and drinking tea with high society ladies. But China is occupied by invading Japanese forces and things are not always what they seem in wartime.

Jiazhi’s life is a front. A patriotic student radical, her mission is to seduce a powerful employee of the occupying government and lead him to the assassin’s bullet. Yet as she waits for him to arrive at their liaison, Jiazhi begins to wonder if she is cut out to be a femme fatale and coldly take Mr Yi to his death. Or is she beginning to fall in love with him?

A passionate tale of espionage, deception and love, Lust, Caution is accompanied here by four further dazzling short stories by Eileen Chang.

Reviews

A most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale

—— Oscar Wilde

It really does turn your blood cold

—— Colm Tóibín

Technically, he is extraordinarily brilliant, and stylistically he's wonderful

—— David Lodge

Henry James is as solitary in the history of the novel as Shakespeare is in the history of poetry

—— Graham Greene

[James] is the most intelligent man of his generation

—— T. S. Eliot

The Turn of the Screw is the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read in any literature, ancient or modern

—— Independent

We are afraid of something unnamed, of something, perhaps, in ourselves... Henry James...can still make us afraid of the dark

—— Virginia Woolf

Dark, funny and disturbing

—— London Review of Books

These 10 inventive stories, set mostly in the Florida Everglades, mix satire and sophisticated whimsy

—— New York Times

Karen Russell has produced an engaging debut. Her ability to integrate mythology and the supernatural with the very contemporary...is reminiscent of Angela Carter, but unlike Carter's many imitators, Russell never descends into whimsy... In St Lucy's, humans, ghosts and animals are utterly real; and Russell sells the genuine article, a seemingly effortless writer

—— Alisa Cox , Mslexia

These are stories that will sneak into the back of your brain and lurk there long after you are finished reading.

—— Global Review

Poignant and wonderful story...concentrates, without effort, all Malouf's themes...it needs to be read

—— Prospect
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