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 suddenly changes as the Japanese invade Shanghai and they have to flee - too late, one of the sisters is interned and tells the horrors of her ordeal. After the war, it becomes clear that Shanghai will never be the same again and the close-knit family begins to break up and build separate lives in other parts of the world.