FX/Hulu’s Shōgun won nineteen Emmys, four Golden Globes, and four Critics Choice Awards. The most talked about and awarded series on television. Read the book that started it all! By #1 New York Times bestselling author James Clavell, Shōgun, the classic epic novel of feudal Japan that captured the heart of a culture and the imagination of the world, is now available for the first time in serial format. Part One contains the first half of the complete novel. After Englishman John Blackthorne is lost at sea, he awakens in a place few Europeans know of and even fewer have seen: Nippon. Thrust into the closed society that is seventeenth-century Japan, a land where the line between life and death is razor-thin, Blackthorne must negotiate not only a foreign people, with unknown customs and language, but also his own definitions of morality, truth, and freedom. As internal political strife and a clash of cultures lead to seemingly inevitable conflict, Blackthorne’s loyalty and strength of character are tested by both passion and loss, and he is torn between two worlds that will each be forever changed. Powerful and engrossing, capturing both the rich pageantry and stark realities of life in feudal Japan, Shōgun is a critically acclaimed powerhouse of a book. Heart-stopping, edge-of-your-seat action melds seamlessly with intricate historical detail and raw human emotion. Endlessly compelling, this sweeping saga captivated the world to become not only one of the best-selling novels of all time but one of the highest-rated television miniseries, as well as inspiring a nationwide surge of interest in the culture of Japan. Shakespearean in both scope and depth, Shōgun is, as the New York Times put it, “not only something you read—you live it.”

Idaho, 1879. When the McCandles gang shoots up a small town, seventeen-year-old Joseph Roper decides to bring them to justice, alone. Decades later in 1938, he tells his story to an interviewer with the Federal Writers Project. “A lot of people go to those moving-picture shows and think they’re seeing the real McCoy, but that’s not the way it was. You take a guy like William S. Hart, or that kid, John Wayne. They try to come off rough-barked, but they’re nothing but a bunch of lilies compared to men like Ian McCandles. “I’ll tell you something else about those cowboy pictures. They’re clean, barely a smudge of dirt anywhere, but what happened out there in City of Rocks wasn’t clean. It was grimy and smelly and gut-numbingly cold. Men died, and when they did they didn’t just grab their chests and fall over. They got knocked down hard and the life spilled out of them like blood from a butchered hog. I guess I ought to know since I was there. Since it was me who did most of the killing that day.”