- Published: 1 September 2010
- ISBN: 9781407013091
- Imprint: Vintage Digital
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 400
The Teahouse Fire
- Published: 1 September 2010
- ISBN: 9781407013091
- Imprint: Vintage Digital
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 400
The Teahouse Fire is a novel as exquisitely intricate and carefully presented as the tea ceremonies it depicts. It is a masterful act, and a most captivating portrait of a changing society. A book to savour
Matt Haig, author of Dead Fathers Club
A rich story, to be savoured for its detail rather than its plot
Observer
Avery's writing is saturated with color and detail; she manages to make 19th-century Japan both accessible and exotic
Boston Globe
Fans of historical fiction, as well as those with an appetite for all things Japanese, should consider Ellis Avery's The Teahouse Fire... This brims with intricate details about Japanese culture: the ways of the samurai, the different castes, the role of women
USA Today
In Ellis Avery's The Teahouse Fire, aesthetic rules vie with politics, sex and human feeling. Avery has whipped up a heady brew of sex and human feeling
Liza Dalby, author of The Tale of Murasaki, Geisha and Kimono
Should appeal to fans of Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day
Scotland on Sunday
The tea ceremony becomes a tiny stage on which grand passions are enacted... Avery captures all this with the emotional poise befitting her characters, and great sensual pleasure. Her novel is a rather beautiful thing: all the more so for emulating the values of another world
Financial Times
Vivid and engrossing... Although this is a historical novel as well as a coming-of-age book, the depth of Avery's exploration of her period and her characters lets her soar above the limitations of both genres...[it is] a novel that, like the tea ceremony itself, provides true pleasure to the intellect and all the senses
Los Angeles Times
With meticulous detail and exquisite sensuality, Avery invites us into a lost world on the brink of transformation. The Teahouse Fire is an absolute spellbinder
Emma Donoghue, author of SLAMMERKIN