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.