20th-Century Manchuria, Long-Forgotten Plague Captivate In New Historical Novel
The year is 1910 and the setting is the Russian city of Kharbin, a frozen desolate outpost in Manchuria. An uneasy peace exists between the Chinese and Russians who live there, and then comes the plague. So begins “The Winter Station,” a poignant new historical novel by author Jody Shields.
The narrative was inspired by a real-life Russian aristocrat and physician whose memoir of loss, hope and determination was lost until Shields found a single copy in Germany nearly a decade ago.
Shields joins Here & Now‘s Robin Young to talk about her new novel, the Baron she discovered and the region’s troubled history.
- Scroll down to read an excerpt from “The Winter Station”
Interview Highlights
On discovering the real-life Baron’s memoir
“Any time I can spend time in the library, it works for me, and I was at the New York Academy of Medicine Library. I just happened to be browsing through medical literature as one does, and I found a little mention of this forgotten plague in Manchuria and that a Baron, an aristocrat, had written about it, and the book had been lost. So I immediately was electrified, and I launched a search for the book, which I found in Germany, and bought, I think, probably the last copy available, and it was in German. So then a process of finding many translators to help me began.”
On the historical context
“Manchuria was an area of China that actually was unexplored
