He would relive for a long time everything she said to him in the room at the mission. He wouldrecall the way her voice had grown thicker and thicker, and how her head had begun to hang toone side from the exhaustion of her telling, and how he made himself face the photograph of thedead child…
Shanghai, 1927- hot, teeming, mysterious. Kenneth Ayres, a disciple of Freud, is an anonymousexpatriate treating the lonely wives and daughters of British colonials. When Julia Paradise, thewife of an Australian missionary, is sent to him for psychoanalysis, he is seduced into her world,a kaleidoscope of incestuous eroticism and grotesque hallucinations. But Ayres hides an evendarker secret…