This image is the cover for the book Blue-Eyed Shan, The Far East Trilogy

Blue-Eyed Shan, The Far East Trilogy

The battle between East and West explodes in a remote corner of Burma in this electrifying saga from master storyteller Stephen Becker

In the years before World War II, Harvard-trained anthropologist Greenwood journeyed to the Shan States in eastern Burma to study the people of Pawlu, an isolated mountain village. He fell in love with Loi-mae, a local woman, and fathered a daughter, but when war erupted across the globe, Greenwood left his family behind to fight for the Allied cause.

In 1949, he returns to Pawlu to help an old friend on the run from China’s Red Army—a friend who claims to be in possession of the missing bones of the Peking Man. But Greenwood isn’t welcomed back to Burma with open arms. Loi-mae has a new husband who doesn’t take kindly to the return of her former lover, and the village is preoccupied by attacks from the wild Wa, a fearsome, headhunting tribe. When a band of refugee Chinese soldiers arrives, the stage is set for a dramatic showdown in which Greenwood risks everything to save the people he loves.

The Blue-Eyed Shan is the 3rd book in the Far East Trilogy, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

Stephen Becker

Stephen Becker (1927–1999) was an American author, translator, and teacher whose published works include eleven novels and the English translations of Elie Wiesel’s The Town Behind the Wall and André Malraux’s The Conquerors. He was born in Mount Vernon, New York, and after serving in World War II, he graduated from Harvard University and studied in Peking and Paris, where he was friends with the novelist Richard Wright and learned French in part by reading detective novels. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Becker taught at numerous schools throughout the United States, including the University of Iowa, Bennington College, and the University of Central Florida in Orlando. His best-known works include A Covenant with Death (1965), which was adapted into a Warner Brothers film starring Gene Hackman and George Maharis; When the War Is Over (1969), a Civil War novel based on the true story of a teenage Confederate soldier executed more than a month after Lee’s surrender; and the Far East trilogy of literary adventure novels: The Chinese Bandit (1975), The Last Mandarin (1979), and The Blue-Eyed Shan (1982).

Open Road Integrated Media