In the tradition of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, a sweeping and affecting novel that takes Puccini's much loved Madame Butterfly as its dramatic starting point. Lee Langley's bewitching story of lost hope and thwarted love opens where Puccini's opera ends; with Madame Butterfly - Cho-Cho-San - handing over her beloved son to his American father before killing herself. In America Joey grows up torn between two cultures, haunted, like his parents, by their memories of what really happened on that fateful day. But just as Joey's fate is inextricably linked with the country of his birth, so too is the fate of America, and both of their paths will ultimately lead to Nagasaki.