Flash House

Overview

From the acclaimed author of CLOUD MOUNTAIN comes a suspenseful novel of rescue and redemption set in Central Asia at the start of the Cold War, with two unforgettable heroines whose fates are irrevocably intertwined. When a plane carrying American journalist Aidan Shaw goes down in Kashmir in 1949, Aidan’s wife Joanna refuses to accept that he is dead. Aidan has been accused of harboring Communist sympathies, and his mission to Kashmir was supposed to clear his name of these charges. Now Joanna is convinced that his disappearance involves more than accident. With Aidan’s best friend and a mysterious native girl, Kamla, whom she has saved from an Indian brothel—or “flash house,” Joanna sets off for the northernmost reaches of India. The ensuing journey leads over some of the highest mountain passes in the world, finally landing the rescuers in western China just weeks before the Communist takeover—a world where nothing is as it appears.

Author Biography

Aimee Liu’s work includes the novels Cloud Mountain, Face, and Glorious Boy (to be published in 2020), as well as the memoirs Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders and Solitaire. Her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is a past president of PEN USA and a current member of the faculty of Goddard College’s MFA program in creative writing at Port Townsend, WA. She lives in Los Angeles.