Five years in the writing, Eight Million Gods and Demons is the mesmerizing debut novel of Hiroko Sherwin. With echoes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Hiroko Sherwin evokes the demons of her country's past to explore the complexities of the human condition. The profoundly moving story of three generations of the Imura family begins with Emi Imura's brave fight against epilepsy as we embark on a poignant odyssey into the family's turbulent history. Her husband, Taku, idealist and modernizer, loves his wife, yet betrays her with Geisha Hana. Dreaming of playing a part in world affairs, his own life inevitably reflects the ambitions of his country as it progresses onwards in its ill-conceived and ill-fated quest for Japanese supremacy in Asia. Spanning the Japanese Meiji era in the 1890s to the Second World War, Eight Million Gods and Demons is a haunting epic of jealousy, forbidden love and loss.