Shogun

· Dell
4.8
403 reviews
Ebook
1152
Pages

About this ebook

SOON TO BE AN FX LIMITED SERIES • A bold English adventurer. An invincible Japanese warlord. A beautiful woman torn between two ways of life. All brought together in an extraordinary saga aflame with passion, conflict, ambition, and the struggle for power.

Here is the world-famous novel of Japan that is the earliest book in James Clavell’s masterly Asian saga. Set in the year 1600, it tells the story of a bold English pilot whose ship was blown ashore in Japan, where he encountered two people who were to change his life: a warlord with his own quest for power, and a beautiful interpreter torn between two ways of life and two ways of love.
 
The principal figures are John Blackthorne, whose dream it is to be the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe, to wrest control of the trade between Japan and China from Portuguese, and to return home a man of wealth and position; Toranaga, the most powerful feudal lord in Japan, who strives and schemes to seize ultimate power by becoming Shogun—the Supreme Military Dictator—and to unite the warring samurai fiefdoms under his own masterly and farsighted leadership; and the Lady Mariko, a Catholic convert whose conflicting loyalties to the Church and her country are compounded when she falls in love with Blackthorne, the barbarian intruder.
 
In dramatizing how a Westerner, the representative man of his time, comes to be altered by his exposure to an alien culture, Mr. Clavell provides a spellbinding depiction of a nation seething with violence and intrigue as it moves from the medieval world to the modern.

Praise for Shogun

“I can’t remember when a novel has seized my mind like this one. . . . It’s not only something you read—you live it.”New York Times Book Review
 
“Adventure and action, the suspense of danger, shocking touching human relationships . . . a climactic human story.”Los Angeles Times
 
“A tale surging with action, intrigue and love . . . a huge cast . . . vast and dramatic . . . stunning . . . savage . . . beautiful . . . an extraordinary performance.”Publishers Weekly
 
“Exciting, totally absorbing...be prepared for late nights, meals unlasting, buisness unattended.”Philadelphia Inquirer

Ratings and reviews

4.8
403 reviews
Michael Rad
December 25, 2014
A hundred different descriptions of people drinking tea. Inhabitants who walk by a chopped up human body without a care but faint at the site of a cooked pheasant. All of the schlock can't take away from an irresistible story premise.
A Google user
July 21, 2017
Had the whole series til my first divorce then all my good books disappeared!! The Shogun, Tai-Pan 1-2. King Rat were incredible reading. They couldn't even too badly mess the two movies they made. Similar and second only to the Dune series by Herbert. Happy trails!
Mike Smith (BrainPaint)
February 23, 2015
Easily my favorite book. I had a paperback copy of it that got so ragged from reading it over the years I had to get a newer paperback book of it. I also bought it in digital format just to have it on my tablet. I bought the full DVD set of the TV mini series and love it as well but the Movie focuses too much on the love story between Blacktorne and Mariko. Now the book also does a good job of this topic and it is a major part of the book but what the book does much better than the movie is cover the topic of what the character that the book is really about....Lord Toranaga. The movie really does not go into the depth of his character and how much of a role he plays in the whole story. So if you have watched the mini series and liked it, get the book as it is much better.

About the author

James Clavell, who died in 1994, was a screenwriter, director, producer, and novelist born in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Although he wrote the screenplays for a number of acclaimed films, including The Fly (1958), The Great Escape (1963), and To Sir With Love (1967), he is best known for his epic novels in his Asian Saga.


From the Paperback edition.

Reading information

Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.