In a distant matriarchal land, a woman’s passions for two American brothers spell love and lust, jealousy and betrayal, in a suspenseful historical novel by the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Last Rose of Shanghai.

1950s China. In a land of misty hot springs and star-kissed hills lives Lazo, a woman of the Moso people, who follow a matriarchal tradition where women freely choose their lovers and marriage doesn’t exist. Lazo, beautiful and free-spirited, longs to become a mother.

When two brothers, Noah and Adam Starlings, arrive stranded and starving, they are met with Lazo’s generosity. Adam, a charming artist with a restless heart, is intrigued by the no-marriage custom, but Noah, a physician with a traumatic past, values fidelity above all. As the brothers attempt to make sense of a world where men hold little power, they grow attracted to Lazo, deepening their fraught relationships, even as jealousy, betrayal, and a buried secret threaten to destroy them—and the lives of a generation to come.

Weaving in a multigenerational quest for the truth, this rare novel conjures a spellbinding story of freedom and forgiveness, breathing life into a vanishing culture while charting an inevitable clash between tradition and modernity.