Stone-Paper-Scissors, an old Chinese gambling game, sets the scene for this fascinating story of the lives of four sisters brought up in Shanghai in the early part of the twentieth century. The story of Mary, Ivy, Bessie and Nellie begins in Mexico and ends in Britain, but it is the period of their impressionable youth and early adulthood in turbulent Shanghai that forms the core of this dramatic and heartwarming account. The stability of life in the city’s International Settlement suddenl...