Shogun (Shōgun)
Author(s): James Clavell
A bold English adventurer. An invincible Japanese warlord. A beautiful woman torn between two ways of life. All brought together in an extraordinary saga aflame with passion, conflict, ambition, and the struggle for power.
Here is the world-famous novel of Japan that is the earliest book in James Clavell's masterly Asian saga.
Set in the year 1600, it tells the story of a bold English pilot whose ship was blown ashore in Japan, where he encountered two people who were to change his life: a warlord with his own quest for power, and a beautiful interpreter torn between two ways of life and two ways of love.
The principal figures are John Blackthorne, whose dream it is to be the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe, to wrest control of the trade between Japan and China from Portuguese, and to return home a man of wealth and position; Toranaga, the most powerful feudal lord in Japan, who strives and schemes to seize ultimate power by becoming Shogun--the Supreme Military Dictator--and to unite the warring samurai fiefdoms under his own masterly and farsighted leadership; and the Lady Mariko, a Catholic convert whose conflicting loyalties to the Church and her country are compounded when she falls in love with Blackthorne, the barbarian intruder. In dramatizing how a Westerner, the representative man of his time, comes to be altered by his exposure to an alien culture, Mr. Clavell provides a spellbinding depiction of a nation seething with violence and intrigue as it moves from the medieval world to the modern. Praise for Shogun "I can't remember when a novel has seized my mind like this one. . . . It's not only something you read--you live it."--New York Times Book Review "Adventure and action, the suspense of danger, shocking touching human relationships . . . a climactic human story."--Los Angeles Times "A tale surging with action, intrigue and love . . . a huge cast . . . vast and dramatic . . . stunning . . . savage . . . beautiful . . . an extraordinary performance."--Publishers Weekly "Exciting, totally absorbing...be prepared for late nights, meals unlasting, buisness unattended."--Philadelphia Inquirer
General Information
- :
- : Hodder & Stoughton
- : Hodder Paperbacks
- : 0.67
- : 28 November 1999
- : books
Other Specifications
- : James Clavell
- : Paperback
- : English
- : 1136
- : FV
More About The Product
James Clavell's most famous and best-loved novel repackaged for a new generation
'SHOGUN is a huge exotic, blood-stained canvas of sixteenth century but still medieval Japan, rival warlords and proselytising Jesuits, geishas, seppuku, samurai with the death-with and a shipwrecked Elizabethan' -- Guardian 'Unquestionably the best historical novel of its kind since Anthony Adverse' -- Los Angeles Times 'I can't remember when a novel has seized my mind like this one. It's irresistable, maybe unforgettable. Clavell ... creates a world so enveloping you forget who and where you are' -- New York Times 'One of the great page turners of all time' -- Good Book Guide 'My bet for the most satisfyingly popular novel of the year ... It has power, it has violence, subtlety and lots, lots more ... Clavell never puts a foot wrong ... Get it, read it, you'll enjoy it mightily' -- Daily Mirror 'Mr Clavell tells his story brilliantly' -- The Times 'My bet for the most satisfyingly popular novel of the year ... It has power, it has violence, subtlety and lots, lots more ... Clavell never puts a foot wrong ... Get it, read it, you'll enjoy it mightily' -- Daily Mirror 'SHOGUN is a huge exotic, blood-stained canvas of sixteenth century but still medieval Japan, rival warlords and proselytising Jesuits, geishas, seppuku, samurai with the death-with and a shipwrecked Elizabethan' -- Guardian 'Mr Clavell tells his story brilliantly' -- The Times 'One of the great page turners of all time' -- Good Book Guide 20020208 'I can't remember when a novel has seized my mind like this one. It's irresistable, maybe unforgettable. Clavell ... creates a world so enveloping you forget who and where you are' -- New York Times 20020208
James Clavell, the son of a Royal Navy family, was educated in Portsmouth before, as a young artillery officer, he was captured by the Japanese at the Fall of Singapore. It was on this experience that his bestselling novel KING RAT was based. He maintained this oriental interest in his other great works: TAI-PAN, SHOGUN, NOBLE HOUSE and GAI JIN.