At the Emperor’s Pleasure follows the young couple Christopher and Topsy Man through the savage battle for Hong Kong and four years of enforced separation, he as a prisoner of war and forced labourer in Kobe, Japan, she interned in Stanley Camp, Hong Kong.

The book is not about Christopher and Topsy Man alone but also of close friends and colleagues forced to suffer inhumane cruelty and deprivation at the hands of their captors.

Some of Topsy’s nursing colleagues were raped and murdered, one friend was imprisoned within shouting distance of her husband being tortured then executed by the Kempeitai, while another died when their camp was mistakenly bombed by the Allies. Topsy was herself the reluctant witness to a macabre ritual execution.

Christopher lost brother officers and many of the Cockney soldiers under his command in the battle for Hong Kong. Others drowned in the East China Sea, victims of a barbaric but little-known mass war crime, the sinking of the Lisbon Maru. Still others survived the sinking, some of them rescued by brave Chinese fishermen, only to succumb to the harsh regime of the POW camp in Japan. Perhaps most tragic of all, four of Christopher’s men came through the battle, the Lisbon Maru sinking and cruel imprisonment, only to die when the aircraft carrying them to freedom crashed into the sea during a typhoon.

Like many of their generation who suffered at the hands of the Japanese during the second world war, Christopher and Topsy Man rarely spoke of their experience, and when they did, they were guarded in what they chose to share of it, even with those closest to them in their post-war lives.

With privileged access to personal letters, diaries and records from the wartime years, from memories exchanged with those close to Christopher and Topsy and from knowledge generously shared by other historians, the author has written a compelling and moving account of the young couple’s lives being torn apart by world events in late 1941.