From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the
Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day comes this stunning
work of soaring imagination.
Born in early-twentieth-century Shanghai, Banks was orphaned at the age
of nine after the separate disappearances of his parents. Now, more than
twenty years later, he is a celebrated figure in London society; yet the
investigative expertise that has garnered him fame has done little to
illuminate the circumstances of his parents' alleged kidnappings. Banks
travels to the seething, labyrinthine city of his memory in hopes of
solving the mystery of his own, painful past, only to find that war is
ravaging Shanghai beyond recognition-and that his own recollections are
proving as difficult to trust as the people around him.
Masterful, suspenseful and psychologically acute, When We Were Orphans
offers a profound meditation on the shifting quality of memory, and the
possibility of avenging one's past.