Taras Grescoe, a non-fiction specialist, writes essays, articles and books. His work has been translated into a half dozen languages, and has won national and international awards. An expert on transit and urbanism, he also gives keynotes on the theme of sustainable transportation. He is the author of six books, including Sacré Blues, The End of Elsewhere, The Devil’s Picnic, Bottomfeeder, Straphanger and now Shanghai Grand. Born in Toronto, raised in Calgary and Vancouver, and schooled in flânerie in Paris, he now lives in Montreal.

Shanghai Grand: Forbidden Love and International Intrigue on the Eve of the Second World War

To understand what the world’s going to be like tomorrow, you have to understand China today. And to understand today’s China, you have to know what her greatest city — Shanghai — was like yesterday. Shanghai Grand is a passport to the International Settlement of the 1930s, a time when the foreign-controlled city was the crucible for all the ideologies — western colonialism and Chinese communism, authoritarianism and nationalism, free-market capitalism and globalization — that forged Asian history in the twentieth century, and whose legacy is making history in the twenty-first.