The Ginger Tree
By (Author) Oswald Wynd
Eland Publishing Ltd
Eland Publishing Ltd
25th April 2003
25th April 2003
New edition
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
823.914
Paperback
312
In 1903 Mary Mackenzie sails for China to marry the British Military Attache, a man who turns out to be every bit as chilly as the Peking Winter. During one of his many absences, Mary has an affair with a Japanese soldier, Count Kurihama, but her pregnancy is impossible to keep secret. Rejected by husband, mother and country, and forced to leave her daughter behind, Mary flees to Japan. The Ginger Tree tells the fascinating story of her survival, isolated and alone, in this alien culture.
"By the end it is the reader who sheds the tears his heroine has kept back for almost 40 years" Nicholas Shakespeare Sunday Telegraph
Oswald Wynd was brought up in Japan by Scots missionary parents, returning to Scotland in 1932 to take up a place at Edinburgh University. During the war he was commissioned into the Intelligence Corps and sent to Malaya. He was captured by the Japanese after a week alone in the jungle, following the fall of Singapore, and spent over three years in a POW camp, during which he was mentioned in dispatches for his interpreting work. During the last year of the war he began a novel which won the Doubleday prize in 1947. He now lives in Scotland and writes thrillers under the pseudonym Gavin Black.