Butterfly's Shadow

In a Japan still rigid with tradition, an apprehensive fifteen-year-old tea-house girl prepares to welcome her first client. In his gleaming white uniform, Lieutenant Pinkerton walks up the hill to a house in Nagasaki to find the female he has purchased for a few weeks. When he sails away, she waits, aching for his return.It is one of the world's great love stories. And, as the curtain falls on Madame Butterfly, Cho-Cho hands over her son to his American father, before killing herself. In a daring imaginative leap, Lee Langley takes this searing moment as a springboard, sending Puccini's characters spinning into a future undreamed of in the original. In America with his father and new step-mother, Joey grows up torn between two cultures. And in different ways, they are all haunted by that fateful day, by a secret that, once revealed, will change everything.Struggling towards self-discovery they are caught in the shifting perspectives of the twentieth century -- the...