AustLit

Hong Kong, 1937: Orphaned by the sudden death of her father, a shady Hong Kong dealer in antiquities, 19-year-old Leah Kolbe finds she has been left penniless. Her only assets are the skills her father taught her: connoisseurship, secretiveness, and duplicity.

She is approached by a Mr. Chang, who claims to have known her father and offers her a commission to go to Manchukuo (the Japanese puppet kingdom recently established in Manchuria) to smuggle out Chinese Imperial treasures. She consents and, accompanied by her faithful amah and a White Russian woman in Chang’s pay, takes the train north. The trip is perilous, as is her return through besieged Nanking and by sampan across the South China Sea. But it is not until she reaches the empty house back in Hong Kong that Leah becomes her own “country of one.”

Source: Publisher's Blurb