The Peking Letter

From the well-known New York Times correspondent who brought the Chinese Revolution alive to Americans in the 1940s, a thrilling debut novel of the burgeoning love affair between a young American intelligence agent obsessed with ancient China and a rebellious young Communist, set against the backdrop of China at the height of the civil war.. The Peking Letter is Seymour Toppings remarkable recreation of China on the eve of revolution. Torn by his infatuation for a saucy Chinese student with Communist sympathies, CIA agent Eric Jensen finds himself thrust into the epicenter of the Chinese Revolution. With the eye of a seasoned journalist, Topping shows us the details of a civilization in peril: the inside of upscale brothels and traditional pleasure houses, the corridors of military compounds, and the quiet inner chambers of Buddhist temples. The Peking Letter is Seymour Toppings remarkable recreation of China on the eve of revolution. Torn by his infatuation for a saucy Chinese student with Communist sympathies, a CIA agent, Eric Jensen, finds himself thrust into the epicenter of the Chinese Revolution.Topping takes the reader to the sites he covered as a young correspondent for the New York Times the streets of Nanking under siege, the trenches outside the sacked city of Peking.
With the eye of a seasoned journalist, he shows us the details of a civilization in peril: the inside of upscale brothels and traditional pleasure houses, the corridors of military compounds, and the quiet inner chambers of Buddhist temples.Toppings panoramic picture of revolutionary China is both a love story, and a remarkable view of a society on the brink of social and cultural transformation.