The grip­ping account of two mar­ried jour­nal­ists — the grand­son of Hol­ly­wood real estate pio­neer Joseph Stern and a for­mer MGM scriptwriter — who togeth­er endured bombs in wartime Chi­na and were chased by Japan­ese forces across the Pacif­ic dur­ing World War II.

Melville Jaco­by was drawn to Chi­na as an exchange stu­dent in 1936. After fin­ish­ing his stud­ies at Stan­ford, he returned to Asia as a reporter in 1939 and doc­u­ment­ed Shang­hai’s Jew­ish refugees, bond­ed with for­eign cor­re­spon­dents in Chi­na’s besieged cap­i­tal of Chongqing (his best friend was Theodore H. White), and was arrest­ed cov­er­ing Japan’s pres­ence in French Indochi­na, then con­trolled by the Nazi-aligned Vichy gov­ern­ment.

Dur­ing a state­side trip, Mel encoun­tered an erst­while class­mate, Annalee Whit­more, before return­ing to Chongqing as TIME’s chief Far East reporter. When Annalee arrived soon there­after for work, they fell in love, but Mel was trans­ferred to Mani­la. Analee final­ly reached the Philip­pines in late 1941, where she and Mel mar­ried just before war erupt­ed, set­ting the cou­ple off on their dan­ger­ous island-hop­ping adventure.