La tierra pura

It is 1858. Thomas Glover is a gutsy 18 year old who grasps the chance of escape to foreign lands. Within ten years he amasses a great fortune in Japan, learns the ways of the samurai, and, on the other side of the law, brings about the overthrow of the Shogun. Yet beneath Glover s astonishing success lies a man cut to the heart. His love affair with a courtesan a woman who, would bear him the son for which he had always longed would form a tragedy so dramatic as to be immortalized in the stories of Madame Butterfly and Miss Saigon. The Pure Land relives in fiction the arc of Glover ms true life rise and fall, and forges a hundred year saga that culminates in the annihilation of Nagasaki in 1945