Amalie Berenger is magnificently beautiful and monumentally bitter. Humiliated beyond measure in France during World War II, she has come to Shanghai with only one purpose - to murder the man who tormented her.

She doesn't expect to meet her long lost mother, one of Shanghai's most prominent women, and the father she never knew, a brilliant political leader.

She doesn't dream she will fall in love with Michael Cassidy - a Catholic priest.

She can't imagine amid the turmoil of China's communist revolution, she will finally become the woman she was always meant to be.