John Hersey

White Lotus

First edition, 1965

White Lotus (1965) is an alternate history novel in which China has conquered the United States and white Americans have been reduced to a subordinate slave caste. The narrator, a young Arizona girl given the name White Lotus by her captors, is transported to China and sold into domestic servitude. The novel follows her life across decades, from field labor and household bondage through the gradual emergence of a civil rights movement among the white population. Hersey described the book in his author's note as “an extended dream about the past... a history that might have been, a tale of an old shoe on a new foot.” The racial inversion is pointed and deliberate, drawing on the history of American slavery and the contemporary civil rights struggle to examine how race, power, and resistance operate regardless of who occupies which side of the line.

Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth. New York: Knopf, 1965. #10197.
Fine in nearly fine dust jacket with very small closed tear on front panel.