This book may come as a shock to fans of Linda Jaivin, author of the erotic Eat Me and of The Infernal Optimist, a novel about detention centres, for Jaivin has deserted contemporary themes for historical fiction, a field that has surged in popularity since Kate Grenville’s The Secret River.

Her new novel concerns an episode in the life of the Australian foreign correspondent GE Morrison (‘Morrison of Peking’) – his steamy affair with a young American heiress, conducted against the backdrop of the 1904 Russo-Japanese war. The author, a China scholar, based the story on Morrison’s personal papers and on research in China and the USA. Whereas Grenville, however lyrically she writes, serves her historical realism straight up, Jaivin, as we might expect, gives a wink and a nod to the adventure-romance novel of the Edwardian period. Against the quirky freshness of Jaivin’s usual style the opening of this novel feels distinctly formulaic, but A Most Immoral Woman soon turns into a racy, entertaining read.