Nicole Mones: Night in Shanghai
Thursday January 22nd 7:00 p.m.
The Friends of Crowell Public Library’s Meet the Authors series continues with Night in Shanghai, Nicole Mones’ new novel about the collision of jazz, war, and the Holocaust in 1930s China, has been called "Historical fiction at its best," by NPR critic Alan Cheuse. Mones’ nonfiction writing on China has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and Gourmet Magazine.
The story is set in 1936, as classical pianist Thomas Greene is recruited to Shanghai to lead a jazz orchestra of fellow African-American expats. He becomes the toast of a city obsessed with music, money, pleasure and power, even as it ignores the rising winds of war. Song Yuhua is refined and educated, and bonded to Shanghai's most powerful crime boss in payment for her father's gambling debts. She burns with rage and risks her life spying on her master for the Communist Party. Only when Shanghai is shattered by the Japanese invasion do Song and Thomas find their way to each other. Torn between music and survival, freedom and commitment, love and world war, they are borne on an irresistible riff of melody and improvisation to Night in Shanghai's final, impossible choice. In this impressively researched novel, Nicole Mones weaves in a startling true tale of Holocaust heroism little-known in the West.
One of the earliest participants in U.S.-China trade after the Cold War ban was lifted in the nineteen-seventies, NICOLE MONES began doing business in China immediately after the end of the Cultural Revolution. As an individual she traded textiles with China for eighteen years before she turned to writing about that country. Her novels Night in Shanghai, The Last Chinese Chef, Lost in Translation, and A Cup of Light are in print in more than twenty-three languages and have received multiple juried prizes.
This event is free and open to all. Light refreshments will be served. With wonderful Friends like these, the authors keep coming at Crowell Public Library!
