In 1935, Vanessa Bell`s son Julian (who was also Virginia Woolf`s nephew) went to China to teach at Wuhan University, where he fell in love and had a passionate affair with a woman named Ling Shuhua, a novelist and the wife of his boss, the university dean. This novel documents that romance and its aftermath against the background of the Bloomsbury group and the historical events of the mid-1930s, which included the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the Spanish Civil War, in which Bell was eventually killed.