A witty, playful, intriguing and ultimately very moving novel of identity and loss.<br/><br/>'Stories are the only thing that defy death. Stories are truth. I hereby give you mine…'<br/> <br/>Peking, 1944: Sir Edmund Backhouse is a man of many parts. A polyglot scholar. An effete homosexual. A genius of perversity, a forger, arms salesman, occasional spy and fantasist. Also, if he is to be believed, the onetime lover of the redoubtable Empress Dowager of China, a woman many decades his senior. In his declining years, tended by his friend, Dr Hoeppli, he writes his memoir - 'a wild tale', as he calls it, 'far - fetched and fantastical' - of his affair with the Dowager Empress. <br/> <br/>Beijing, 2014: Linnie is an Australian woman of uncertain provenance struggling to make a living in Beijing. A Sinophile, a translator of film subtitles, the author of an unpublished novel about Backhouse called The Empress Lover. One day, she receives an intriguingly old - fashioned and formal invitation from a Professor H, an invitation that promises to reveal long hidden secrets of her family…<br/> <br/>And so two worlds collide.<br/> <br/>An enchantingly slippery, sinuous, playful - and ultimately very moving - novel of love, loss, identity and history from one of Australia's finest novelists.<br/> <br/>'Jaivin's writing shines and burns.' Sunday Age