Shanghai, 1927 --- hot, teeming, mysterious. Kenneth Ayres, a disciple of Freud, lives as an anonymous expatriate, treating the lonely wives and daughters of British colonials. When Julia Paradise, the wife of an Australian missionary, enters his life, he is seduced into her world, a brilliantly colored jigsaw puzzle of incestuous eroticism and grotesque and magical images. Ayres becomes obsessed with Julia --- exploring her lush and haunted mind through hypnosis, and her body through regular Tuesday afternoon adultery. She leads him into a labyrinth of hallucinations, manipulated memories, and transparent lies, where the truth is never absolute and even the past is transformed. As Shanghai erupts in revolution, Ayres is left to piece together the puzzle, and the reader to map the realms of mystery, dreams, imagination, and myth in this extraordinary novel.
