James Clavell

Japanese POW camp Changi, Singapore: hell on earth for the soldiers contained within its barbed wire walls. Officers and enlisted men, all prisoners together, yet the old hierarchies and rivalries survive. An American corporal, known as the King, has used his personality and wiles to facilitate trading with guards and locals to get needed food, supplies, even information into the camp. The imprisoned upper-class officers have never had to do things...

Taking place over the course of an eventful week in 1963 Hong Kong, James Clavell's Noble House is a masterfully woven novel of true suspense. Ian Dunross, the current tai-pan of the illustrious yet financially troubled Struan empire, is racing to undo the damage his predecessor left behind and to once again stand on stable ground. And he'll do whatever it takes-including striking a hard-fought deal with an American millionaire. But his rival, Quillan...

"There can only be one Tai-Pan." Dirk Struan rose from humble beginnings to build Struan & Company, also known as the Noble House, into the world's largest Far East trading company. He is now the Tai-Pan-Supreme Leader-of all Tai-Pans in China. Along the way, however, he made a powerful enemy. Tyler Brock, Struan's rival from their early opium-smuggling days, also heads a large trading fleet, second in size only to Struan's. But it is not only silks...

A narrative of conflicting cultures, loyalties, motivations, and traditions in early-seventeenth-century Japan, involving the powerful and powerhungry Lord Toranaga, the ambitious Englishman, Blackthorne, and the Lady Mariko, a Catholic convert in love with the barbarian Englishman.

John Blackthorne is a ship-wrecked English navigator who becomes both an observer and a participant in historic changes in Japan during the Tokugawa, or, Edo period. Toranaga is a feuding warlord vying to become the supreme military dictator, or shōgun. Blackthorne is drawn into the turmoil and becomes determined to be the first foreigner to become a samurai warrior.