The Seventh Room - Tapa dura

Thirty years after the end of World War II, Francine Lawrence, a wealthy, half-Chinese businesswoman, is forced to confront her past, when a young woman claiming to be her daughter, Ruth, given away to preserve the child's life, returns. By the author of House of Many Rooms.

ient Chinese belief that in the seventh moon the hungry ghosts of those who have died without proper ceremony come back to haunt the living. In his most mesmerizing novel yet, Marius Gabriel evokes turbulent emotions on every page of this tale of a mother and daughter torn apart by wartime--and of a past never buried.

With Japanese planes bombing Singapore early in World War II, Francine Lawrence and her small daughter, Ruth, wait in the fading splendor of Raffles Hotel for Francine's British husband. Together they will flee to England. But when he is delayed, the hotel demands that Francine, half-Chinese and unwelcome there, leave at once.

Thus begins a terrifying journey, as Francine seeks to escape a world exploding in nightmare--and ultimately makes a gut-wrenching decision: to entrust Ruth to strangers in order to save the child's life. But when the war ends, all traces of Ruth have vanished; years of searching bring only heartbreak.

Three decades later Fran