Told in an enchanting and unforgettable voice, The Teahouse Fire is a lively, provocative, and lushly detailed historical novel of epic scope and compulsive readability. Aurelia becomes Yukako’s closest companion, and they, the Shin family, and all of Japan face a time of great challenges and uncertainty. We see it all through the eyes of Aurelia, an American orphan adopted by the Shin family, proprietors of a tea ceremony school, after their daughter, Yukako, finds her hiding on their grounds. It was a period when wearing a different color kimono could make a political statement, when women stopped blackening their teeth to profess an allegiance to Western ideas, and when Japan’s most mysterious rite-the tea ceremony-became not just a sacramental meal, but a ritual battlefield. The Teahouse Fire is a novel by Ellis Avery set in late nineteenth century Japan published by Riverhead in the US in 2006 and to be published by Random. The story of two women whose lives intersect in late-nineteenth-century Japan, The Teahouse Fire is also a portrait of one of the most fascinating places and times in all of history-Japan as it opens its doors to the West. But her feelings for her mistress seem doomed never to be reciprocated and, as tensions mount in the household, Aurelia begins to realise that to the world around her she will never be anything but an outsider.“Like attending seasons of elegant tea parties-each one resplendent with character and drama. Knowing only a few words of Japanese she hides in a Japanese tea house and is adopted by the family who own it: gradually falling in love with both the Japanese tea ceremony and with her young mistress, Yukako.Īs Aurelia grows up she devotes herself to the family and its failing fortunes in the face of civil war and western intervention, and to Yukako's love affairs and subsequent marriage.

Set in late nineteenth century Japan, The Teahouse Fire is the story of Aurelia, a young French-American girl who, after the death of her mother and her missionary uncle, finds herself lost and alone and in need of a new family. The Teahouse Fire is a novel by Ellis Avery set in late nineteenth century Japan published by Riverhead in the US in 2006 and to be published by Random House in the UK as a paperback original.

390 pp (first edition, paperback original)ĩ78-0-09-951618-7 (first edition, paperback)

The teahouse fire by ellis avery