"A pepper-tongued, tango-dancing Asian beauty rises from a village girlhood to become the wife of her country's dictator and then a leader of the rebel forces arrayed against him. She is the electric eponymous heroine of a novel that resonates with the fevers and tumults of our era, that opens with a captive lion's roar and moves halfway around the world and through our century - from the turbulent Asian country here called Daya to America and back, from the 1940s to the 1990s." "From our earliest glimpses of the edgy young girl in a busy, gossipy, close-knit river hamlet, we know we are in the presence of a star: energized, funny, dangerously savvy, and on the move from the day when a boy in her compound teaches her the dance that will name her and crucially affect her fate." "It is a fate that carries her, dazzled, to Daya's capital and the talent contest where her performance (in a sun-and-star-spangled dress) of the "Irrawaddy Tango" captures the obsessed attention of the tough, ambitious colonel, Supremo - an adventurer already on the threshold of power - whom, on a wild impulse, she marries. We see her swimming against the fierce currents of our time, maintaining her equally fierce integrity in the face of her dubious celebrity as consort to Daya's hated, absolute, yet precarious head of state, her capture by the Jesu guerrillas in the Punished Provinces, where she is first prisoner, then foot soldier, then a leader...her recapture, rescue, exile, and mysterious return." "Ten years after Wendy Law-Yone's greatly admired The Coffin Tree, she gives us a novel equally powerful - a novel that, like its heroine, shocks and moves us by its fire and color, by its fluctuation of emotional tone from harsh to tender, cruel to comic, to frighteningly quiet. An unfaltering evocation of lives lived on the rim of the volcano."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved