On the eve of the Second World War, the foreign-controlled port of Shanghai was the rendezvous for the twentieth century's most outlandish adventurers, all under the watchful eye of the illustrious Sir Victor Sassoon.Emily 'Mickey' Hahn was a legendary New Yorker writer who would cover China for nearly fifty years, playing an integral part in opening Asia up to the West. But at the height of the Depression, Hahn had just arrived in Shanghai, nursing a broken heart after a disappointing affair with an alcoholic Hollywood screenwriter, convinced she would never love again. When she entered Sassoon's glittering Cathay Hotel, Hahn was immediately absorbed into the social swirl of the charismatic expats who inhabited it, including Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn and a colourful gangster named Morris 'Two Gun' Cohen. But when she met Zau Sinmay, a Chinese poet from an illustrious family, she finds the real Shanghai through his eyes: the city of rich colonials, gangsters, opium-smokers, displaced Chinese peasants and increasingly desperate White Russian and Jewish refugees - a place her innate curiosity led her to discover first-hand. But danger lurked on the horizon and Mickey barely made it out alive, as the brutal Japanese occupation destroys the seductive world of pre-war Shanghai and paved the way for Mao Tse-tung's Communists to take over China.A compelling tale of fatal glamour and forbidden love, Shanghai Grand is their story, meticulously researched and vividly told.