The Warlord

“Not since Shogun has a Western novelist so succeeded in capturing the essence of Asia” – New York Times

1927 post-Imperial China.

The Great War has left scars behind, marking the world even a decade after its conclusion.

In China, men of British, American, German, Italian, French, and Japanese origin flood into a land recently freed from centuries of Imperial rule, seeing a chance to make a profit and escape the darkness that recently shrouded the world.

Unlike many of his American countrymen, Philip Embree has not come to China for money, but to spread Christianity and the word of God.

But when the train on which the young missionary is travelling is hijacked by bandits, he finds himself thrust into a world that he could never have imagined.

Caught up in the country’s surging of power, passion, and betrayal, Embree’s future becomes inextricably involved in that of General Tang — a great warlord who protects the family of the Kong patriarch in the city of Qufu.

Tang’s military needs put him in contact with gunrunner Erich Luckner, a handsome blond German whose time in Russia — first as a prisoner of war, and later as a soldier for Czarist forces — has damaged him in ways that most can never imagine.

The lives of these three men, and their love for Vera, tangle together as unrest ripples across China, power shifting from the hands of one warlord to the next.

And in the wings, a young Mao Tse-tung, dismissed by his countrymen as an insignificant figure, is gathering an army.

The splendor, the violence and the passion of Post-Imperial China is brought to life in The Warlord.

Malcolm Joseph Bosse (1926–2002) was an American author of both young adult and adult novels. He was born in Detriot, Michigan, and is a graduate of Yale University. He served in the US Navy and was also an English teacher in City College of New York in Manhattan. His novels are often set in Asia, and have been praised for their cultural and historical information relating to the character's adventures. Bosse mostly wrote historical fiction after the publication of The Warlord, which quickly became a bestseller. He also won the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis in 1983.