The Winter Station

In the Russian city of Kharbin in northern China-a city uniquely positioned at the rich crossroads of several cultures and languages, and accessible to outsiders only by train-people have started to die at an alarming rate. But more frighteningly, their bodies vanish mysteriously before they can be identified: two male travelers who arrived by train; a woman outside a department store, her corpse lost on route to the post mortem; two more men, this time Chinese. The Baron–a Russian aristocrat and the official doctor of Kharbin–sets out to solve the mystery of the deaths and the secrecy and fear surrounding them. An outsider married to a young Chinese woman, he is determined to save Kharbin as he begins to suspect that a deadly plague has broken out. During the dangerously freezing cold winter in what soon becomes a besieged city, the Baron enlists the aid of Andreev, a Russian working on the black market, and of Chang Huai, the charismatic doorman of a luxurious department store. As the Manchurian Plague intensifies, how to treat its victims moves from a place of covert, bureaucratic decision-making, to one of urgency and fear infused with deep cultural suspicion. An emotional and cinematic story set in a frigid frontier city still forging its identity, THE WINTER STATION is a richly textured and brilliant novel about mortality, fear and love.]]>