Manchu Palaces

About the Book

“A rich and nuanced portrait of eighteenth-century China...a magical book.”
Delia Sherman

“Gently intriguing, brilliantly detailed...Lotus’s singular story of enlightenment, involving a statue of the goddess Tara and the secret of a mandala, is the radiant center of these diversions.”
Publishers Weekly

“A luminous, self-contained, fluid world in which history, legend, and religious quest create a portrait of an age—the glittering high noon of the Manchu Empire...An exemplary novelist again makes history a playful parade of personalities, period details, and ordinary people conscripted by the times.”
Kirkus Reviews

“Both educational and thoroughly enjoyable.”
Nancy Pearl, Booklist

About the Author

Jeanne Larsen’s books include the other two novels in her Avalokitesvara trilogy, Silk Road and Bronze Mirror, as well as James Cook in Search of Terra Incognita: a Book of Poems, Brocade Rivers Poems: Selected Works of the Tang Dynasty Courtesan Xue Tao, and Willow, Wine, Mirror, Moon: Women’s Poems from Tang China. She teaches at Hollins University in Virginia.