Tai-Pan

'Intensely readable and exciting' Sunday TelegraphSet in the turbulent days of the founding of Hong Kong in the 1840s, Tai-Pan is the story of Dirk Struan, the ruler - the Tai-Pan - of the most powerful trading company in the Far East. He is also a pirate, an opium smuggler, and a master manipulator of men. This is the story of his fight to establish himself and his dynasty as the undisputed masters of the Orient.'Packed with action . . . gaudy and flamboyant with blood and sin, treachery and conspiracy, sex and murder . . . grand entertainment' New York Times

Packed with action . . . gaudy and flamboyant with blood and sin, treachery and conspiracy, sex and murder . . . grand entertainment, Intensely readable and exciting, James Clavell is a teller of stories. They are complicated and exciting, and you are desperate to know what will happen to his characters because they are like the people you know from your own life and experience, set in strange and sometimes terrible circumstances, Intensely readable and exciting, Packed with action . . . gaudy and flamboyant with blood and sin, treachery and conspiracy, sex and murder . . . grand entertainment

James Clavell, the son of a Royal Navy family, was educated in Portsmouth before, as a young artillery officer, he was captured by the Japanese at the Fall of Singapore. After the war Clavell worked in the film industry producing a number of successful films including To Sir with Love. He died in 1994.