The Pure Land

by Alan Spence

The year is 1858. Thomas Glover is a gutsy eighteen-year-old who grasps the chance of escape to foreign lands and takes a posting as a trader in Japan. Within ten years he amasses a great fortune, learns the ways of the samurai, and, on the other side of the law, brings about the overthrow of the Shogun. Yet beneath Glover's astonishing success lies a man cut to the heart. His love affair with a courtesan - a woman who, unknown to him, would bear him the son for which he had always longed - would form a tragedy so dramatic as to be immortalised in the stories behind Madame Butterfly and Miss Saigon.
The Pure Land relives in fiction the arc of Glover's true-life rise and fall, and forges a hundred-year saga that culminates in the annihilation of Nagasaki in 1945.

(Fom Publisher)

Alan Spence is an acclaimed and popular author of poetry, novels, short stories and plays and has received many awards in each of these genres, including Scottish Writer of the Year for his novel, Stone Garden (1995). He is based in Edinburgh where he and his wife run the Sri Chinmoy Meditation Centre and is currently writer-in-residence at Aberdeen University.