Flora

Flora is a romance novel by the British writer Anne Weale, published in this Worldwide Library printing of 508 pages, ISBN 9780373970049, dated 1983.

The book follows a girl of mixed Chinese and European parentage who grows up belonging to neither community, which is the position the novel puts at its centre. She begins in a village in the west of China and moves from there to Shanghai, a city the book describes as glamorous and corrupt in about equal measure, and eventually to England, where she arrives in a society whose houses and estates are far grander than anything she has known. The story is about her passage into adulthood and about the way she is received by the people who decide whether she counts as one of them. The romance is part of that account rather than the whole of it.

It follows her from childhood to adulthood across three countries.