Shanghai Grand: Forbidden Love and International Intrigue on the Eve of the Second World War

On the eve of the Second World War, the foreign-controlled port of Shanghai was the rendezvous for the twentieth century's most outlandish adventurers, all under the watchful eye of the illustrious Sir Victor Sassoon. Emily Hahn was a legendary New Yorker writer who would cover China for nearly fifty years, playing an integral part in opening Asia up to the West. But at the height of the Depression, Emily 'Mickey' Hahn had just arrived in Shanghai, nursing a broken heart after a disappointing affair with an alcoholic Hollywood screenwriter, convinced she would never love again. When she enters Sassoon's glamorous Cathay Hotel, Hahn is immediately absorbed into the social swirl of the glamorous expats who inhabit it, including Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn and a colourful gangster named Morris 'Two Gun' Cohen. But when she meets Sinmay Zau, a Chinese poet from an illustrious family, she finds the real Shanghai through his eyes: the city of rich colonials, gangsters, opium-smokers, displaced Chinese peasants and increasingly desperate White Russian and Jewish refugees - a place her innate curiosity will lead her to discover first-hand. But danger lurks on the horizon and Mickey barely makes it out alive, as the brutal Japanese occupation destroys the seductive world of pre-war Shanghai and Mao Tse-tung's Communists prepare to take over China.

About the Author :
Taras Grescoe is an award-winning journalist, and the author of five books, which have been translated into six languages on three continents. He is a regular contributor to a wide range of newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, National Geographic Traveler, The Times and the Guardian. He lives in Montreal, Canada.

Review :
As Taras Grescoe, a respected Canadian writer of nonfiction, shows in this marvellous, microscopically descriptive history of what is now one of the most populous and smoggiest megalopolises on earth, Shanghai in the 1930s was internationally notorious as 'the wicked old Paris of the Orient', with 'as vivid a cast of chancers, schemers, exhibitionists, double-dealers and self-made villains as had ever been assembled in one place'. Grescoe lavishly keeps the promise of his book's subtitle. With its surplus of romance and more or less digestible political intrigue, it's not hard to imagine the movie version of Shanghai Grand, a lush period spectacle starring, say, Michelle Williams as Hahn, Chang Chen as Zau and, might I suggest, Ralph Fiennes as Sassoon - he's already displayed an irresistible knack for portraying hoteliers quixotically devoted to upholding the laws of luxury whilst the barbarians storm the gate.