The Curved Jewels by Tom Bradley
BURN YOUR BOOKSHELF
Tom Bradley doesn't write novels—he detonates diplomatic scandals in prose. Curved Jewels is a literary nerve agent disguised as fiction, smuggled out of the Imperial Palace and injected straight into your bloodstream.
This isn't a story. It's a jailbreak. The Crown Princess of Japan-brilliant linguist, coerced consort, reluctant martyr-slips through the gilded cage of Hirohito's legacy with the help of two shady American expatriates. What follows is a hallucinogenic fugue of flesh trades, psychic sabotage, and bureaucratic blasphemy. Bradley's sentences don't behave. They twitch, they bleed, they chant. He drags you through a labyrinth of imperial rot and ecstatic rebellion, where the sacred and the profane share a toothbrush and the sublime wears a cockroach crown.
Are you ready to have your mind bent, your soul audited, and your literary safe-word utterly ignored? This is the book they warned you about. This is the book that reads you.
--Morgen Mofó, authoress of 'SCHMUCKSTÜCK KOORVAH' in Dragonsprach