The Harmony Silk Factory

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"This is the story of Johnny Lim - textile merchant, petty crook, and inventor of the Amazing Toddy Machine - and his marriage to Snow Soong, the most beautiful woman in the Kinta Valley. In 1940, with the Japanese threatening to invade, Johnny and Snow embark upon their honeymoon, recounted in Snow's captivating journal, to the mysterious Seven Maiden Islands, accompanied by a mercurial Japanese professor and Peter Wormwood, an Englishman adrift. Many years later, Wormwood looks back on this defining journey, while Snow's only son goes in search of the truth of his mother and the infamous Chinaman she married." Set against the backdrop of a country in crisis, this novel is both a mystery and a confession that dramatises the ambiguous nature of identity.