In Republican-era Shanghai, there is a mysterious pawnshop that only accepts customers consumed by obsession.
Here, beauty, lifespan, family ties, conscience, and literary talent can all be pawned. The riches and fame you desire can be yours at once.
The price is a lifetime of loss and endless retribution.
Gu Cihuan is the thirty-sixth keeper of the pawnshop. Ageless and immortal, he watches coldly as greed and madness consume the city’s foreign concessions.
A Peking opera star, a down-and-out scholar, a rickshaw puller, a wealthy man’s concubine, a passionate student... Countless ordinary people are swept up by desire and step into this hidden pawnshop in a Shikumen alley.
But he, too, is bound by a heavy pawn contract. His search for his younger sister stretches on, and he must also fight the pawnshop’s true form, which seeks to devour the human world.
Desire has its price. Redemption has no end.
