The Teahouse Fire: Library Edition

“Like attending seasons of elegant tea parties—each one resplendent with character and drama. Delicious.”—Maxine Hong Kingston

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. 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.

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. Aurelia becomes Yukako’s closest companion, and they, the Shin family, and all of Japan face a time of great challenges and uncertainty. 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.

"The tea ceremony becomes a tiny stage on which grand passions are enacted... Avery captures all this with the emotional poise befitting her characters, and great sensual pleasure. Her novel is a rather beautiful thing: all the more so for emulating the values of another world" (Financial Times)

"Should appeal to fans of Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day" (Scotland on Sunday)

"In Ellis Avery's The Teahouse Fire, aesthetic rules vie with politics, sex and human feeling. Avery has whipped up a heady brew of sex and human feeling" (Liza Dalby, author of The Tale of Murasaki, Geisha and Kimono)

"Vivid and engrossing... Although this is a historical novel as well as a coming-of-age book, the depth of Avery's exploration of her period and her characters lets her soar above the limitations of both genres...[it is] a novel that, like the tea ceremony itself, provides true pleasure to the intellect and all the senses" (Los Angeles Times)

"Avery's writing is saturated with color and detail; she manages to make 19th-century Japan both accessible and exotic" (Boston Globe)