Any of James Clavell’s Asian saga novels. I suggest they be read in publication order: King Rat (1962), Tai-Pan (1966), Shogun (1975), Noble House (1981), Whirlwind (1986), Gai-Jin (1993), and Escape: The Love Story from Whirlwind (1994). I have not read the last one, but I know it’s a novella adapted from Whirlwind.
These are fabulous books! Exciting as shit and beautifully written. The sweep of the six full novels runs from the 1600s in Japan through 1975 in Iran, and all of the books are at least tangentially related. They are awesome reads! They take place in a WWII Japanese POW camp in 1945, Hong Kong in 1841 (it’s founding) and in 1963, Japan from the 1600s through 1862 when US Admiral Perry forced Japan’s opening to the rest of the world, and Iran in 1979.
King Rat takes place in a Japanese POW camp in Singapore during WWII and is by far the shortest of them all. While I liked it, it lacks the mature style of his later books.
James Clavell was an excellent writer who could really put you in the scene. Did you see Shogun when it aired the first time? That one and only time, there were no subtitles or dubbing, and Japanese was the language spoken primarily. No, unless you actually spoke Japanese, you could only sit and wonder what in the fuck that must have been like! If you saw it, you know how exciting the mini-series was, especially the first showing. (I was living in Los Angeles at the time and I remember you couldn’t buy a bottle of sake for love nor money! HA!) As is almost always the case, the book was so much more exciting!
They’re serious reads, but worth the time and enjoyment!