Kingfishers Catch Fire by Rumer Godden (Viking, out of print)

“When Sophie had an idea, her child Teresa trembled.”

Sophie is a young British widow in India, with a very small pension and two equally small children. She is adventurous, sentimental, and in love with the Vale of Kashmir. Brought up as a sheltered English girl of good breeding, she is insouciant, viewing the world around her with “superficial eyes.” To Sophie the place she chooses to make her home is a haven surrounded by mountains, perched above a lake, picturesque as are the peasants who live nearby. 

“We shall live a poor and simple life. We shall toil...we shall grow our own vegetables and keep hens and bees, “ she tells Teresa, who has unfortunately been born with common sense and the gift of realism. Teresa observes and puts puzzle pieces together while Sophie is in love with beauty and crippled by her idea of what is necessary to live a basic life.

Her passion for lovely objects leads her to Profit David, a man who deals in beautiful expensive things and Sophie soon goes into debt buying a lamp with a shade that blazes painted kingfishers into light, a gleaming carpet, a Kashmir shawl. The villagers take note of her extravagance and deem her rich. Even the furnishings that Sophie’s upbringing leads her to regard as essentials are thoroughly luxurious to her neighbors: “A bed each. Even for  the children...Aie! She is rich!”

And she is inexplicable. Sophie and her children wear shoes in the house--”dirty!” and she has no husband. In India ladies do not live alone, unless they are “saints or sinners.” Sophie, living with only two servants and her little children, is neither and to her neighbors she seems mad.

Every community has its own politics and in the village near Sophie’s house the two leading families are wrapped in bitter competition. The village children are almost feral, spending their waking hours in the mountain fields, herding cattle. Sophie urges Teresa to make friends with them but Teresa knows better. For her and her little brother Moo, the herd children are dangerous.

Sophie moves in a graceful world of her own, unsettled only by the shape of a compass carved into the floor of her new house. While she works at settling in, blindly and blithely, the compass calls to her with its promise of places still to be seen. Her ignorance of the world around her is a path to disaster and when it hits, it focuses upon Teresa--and, less violently but with equal danger, upon Sophie.

British author Rumer Godden was taken to India when she was an infant, grew up there, and returned to it after completing her education in England. She embarked upon an unsuccessful marriage and when it disintegrated she moved with her two children to the Dal Lake in Kashmir at the start of World War Two. She stayed there for three years, starting an herb farm and “living, thinking and perhaps dreaming.” She left, as Sophie did, because of a disaster that was directed at her and her daughters. But before that occurred, she “wrote endlessly,” and like Sophie, she was obsessed with the beauty that surrounded her.

Godden’s love for India and her knowledge of it lifts Kingfishers Catch Fire well above the customary expat fiction, while gently excoriating the point of view of the customary expat. She presents a classic dissection of the dangers of romanticism and selective blindness, wrapping it in a mixture of the passion and unvarnished realism with which she saw the country she loved and eventually had to leave.~Janet Brown

Quest for Kim : In Search of Kipling's Great Game by Peter Hopkirk (John Murray)

Quest for Kim is author Peter Hopkirk’s attempt to follow in the footsteps of Kim from Rudyard Kipling’s novel of the same name. However, it is not a travelogue but more of a literary detective novel. The days of the Raj’s India are long past so Hopkirk’s journey takes him through the countries of Pakistan and India. He couldn’t have chosen a worse time to partake in this endeavor as the two countries were on the brink of war. 

Hopkirk does his best to leave the politics aside and focuses on his own journey. He wants to see how much of Kim’s India still remains. The trail has him starting from Lahore, Pakistan. He will continue on to Simla, Umballa, Delhi, and travel along the Grand Trunk Road. Hopkirk also sets out to show that the characters in Kim were based on or inspired by real people. 

You do not have to read Kim in order to enjoy this book as Hopkirk provides the necessary passages related to his quest. He admits that there are parts of the story that he would not be able to do justice to and advises the reader that it would be best to read the actions in Kipling’s own words. 

Hopkirk’s first order of business is to determine and argue if Kim was based on a true person and who that might have been. Hopkirk suggests that Kipling would also have been familiar with the story of two likely candidates. The first being a man named Durie who was the son of a British soldier and an Indian woman who traveled through Afghanistan “dressed as a Muslim”. 

The other likely person is a man named Tom Doolan, the son of an Irish sergeant and a Tibetan woman. The story goes that the Irishman deserted his post and ran away with the woman to Tibet, never to be heard from again. Then, years later, a young boy is seen in a market in Darjeeling with “fair hair and blue eyes, but who spoke no English”. “Around his neck, however, was hung an amulet-case containing papers which showed him to be the son of the missing soldier.”  This is the exact same way the chaplain of Kim’s father’s regiment discovers the identity of Kim.

Quest for Kim is a fascinating journey as we follow Hopkirk trace Kim’s journey and gives us the truth behind the real people the characters in the novel are based on. In his research, Hopkirk finds there really was an Afghan horse dealer who he surmises was the model for Mahbug Ali. Hopkirk makes a convincing argument that Colonel Craighton was based on the actions of Thomas Montgomerie who trained locals to “gather topographical and other intelligence in areas where it was far too dangerous for Europeans to travel.” 

This book is definitely not your ordinary travel journal. It is a tribute to Rudyard Kipling’s novel, Kim, whom Hopkirk says first introduced him to the “Great Game” and became obsessed with the story. Once you read this, you may be inclined to read Kipling’s masterpiece or return to it if you have read it before. Perhaps it will inspire you to make your own literary journey of one of your favorite novels. ~Ernie Hoyt

Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama (Riverrun)

This is Hideo Yokoyama’s first book to be published in English. Fourteen years ago in the first week of the sixty-fourth year of the Showa Era or 1989, Prefecture D was in the midst of an investigation involving a large number of police officers. A seven year old girl named Shoko Amamiya was kidnapped and held for a twenty-million yen ransom. The case ended on a sour note as the police found the girl’s dead body five days after the perpetrator escaped with the money. He remains at large and his identity remains unknown. The unsolved case has been given the name Six Four. 

Yoshinobu Mikami has recently been assigned the position of Press Director in Media Relations, a branch of Administrative Affairs, after having served in the Criminal Investigation’s First Division in Nonviolent Crime. He also worked on the kidnapping investigation fourteen years ago. He was a member of the Close Pursuit Unit and had followed the victim’s father, Yoshio Amimiya, to the ransom exchange point. He has been summoned by Akama, the Director of Administrative Affairs and Ishii, the Secretariat Chief to their office. They inform him that the Commissioner General is going to pay them a visit the following week. 

The Commissioner General is the head of the National Police Agency (NPA) which is based in Tokyo. He is responsible for some 260,000 police officers. “To the regional police, he is like the emperor.” The plan is for the Commissioner General to visit the site where the body was found. He will make an offering of incense and flowers, then visit the father at his home to pay his respects. “To make an appeal inside and outside the force, and to give a boost to the officers still investigating the case. To reinforce our intention never to let violent crime go unpunished.” The timing is well-planned as the statute of limitations will go into effect in just a little over a year. Mikami realizes there is more to the Commissioner General’s visit when Akama says, “I do believe his appeal is intended more to reach an internal audience than the general public.” 

Mikami is assigned the task of getting permission from Amamiya for the Commissioner General’s visit. The first time Mikami goes to see Amamiya, his request is flatly refused but persuades Amamiya to change his mind on a subsequent visit. However, on the eve of the Commissioner’s visit, another kidnapping has taken place. The victim is a young girl and the kidnapper has demanded a twenty-million yen ransom. He has also given the victim’s father the same instructions as those given in the Six Four case. It becomes a race against time as the police have to determine if this is a copycat case or if it is the same person who committed the crime fourteen years ago. 

This is an exciting look into the inner workings of the Japanese police investigating process and the relationship between separate divisions within the force. It also sheds light on the politics and bureaucracy of the National Police Agency. It is also a high-paced mystery with an unpredictable outcome and will appeal to fans of Miyuki Miyabe and Keigo Higashino. Once I started reading, I could not put it down. ~Ernie Hoyt

A Wish in the Dark by Christina Soontornvat (Candlewick Press)

Three children roam the city streets of Chattana, on their own but linked together in a way none of them completely understand. Pong and Somkit were born to prisoners which has left both boys marked for life. Nok, the daughter of the prison warden who lost his position after Pong escaped for freedom, is intent upon capturing the fugitive and restoring her father’s lost honor. 

Chattana is a city of brilliant light, surrounded by absolute darkness. Years ago a fire destroyed the city and now all flame is forbidden. The city’s blazing light comes from the power of one man, the Governor, who carries illumination in his fingertips. Under his touch, bulbs flare into globes of colored brightness and only he can decide what areas will receive this gift. 

However he, Pong, and Ampai, a mysterious woman activist who is “a stirrer of hearts,” have one thing in common. All three wear identical bracelets given to them by the abbot of a monastery, who himself carried the gift of light. Their vastly different lives intersect when Ampai plans a protest march against the Governor’s absolute and crushing power with Somkit and Pong promising to help her. The two of them scavenge for the material needed for the protest and as they wander the city, Nok hunts relentlessly for the boy who destroyed her father’s career.

Where did the Governor obtain his ability to brighten the world?  What is the secret behind the scars on Nok’s arm, ones that could only have been inflicted by a forbidden fire?  What is the secret behind Pong’s talent for hearing sounds that nobody else can hear? These questions give this story mysteries that will entice even the most reluctant reader and will make it a splendid read-aloud choice for teachers and parents.

A Wish in the Dark is an intricate and resonant story with plot twists and political parallels that take it beyond the realm of the 8-12 age range that its publisher has assigned to it. While young readers will fall captive to the book’s fantasy and adventure, their parents will recognize the Governor who has turned the City of Wonders to the City of Rules, the City of Order, and who wants to raise taxes to build a “youth reform center.” As Chattana is thronged with people from the farthest corners of the countryside to march peacefully across the city’s bridge, memories of Selma, Hong Kong, and Bangkok come to mind and this story takes on a deeper dimension.

Thai-American Christina Soontornvat has drawn upon Thai culture and history, mixing them with the classic theme of Les Miserables. Within that framework she has placed unforgettable characters who battle against injustice in a novel that will speak to everyone from the age of eight up to eighty. No matter how old or how young its readers may be, they will all be heartened by its message of hope and persistence as they too find themselves wishing in the dark.~Janet Brown

Red Candles and the Mermaid and Other Tales by Mimei Ogawa (Nihon Tosho Kan Kokai)

Mimei Ogawa was born in Joetsu in Niigata Prefecture in 1882. He went to Waseda University and studied Russian and English literature. After graduating, he focused on writing children’s literature and is often cited as the Hans Christian Andersen of Japan. Red Candles and the Mermaid is a collection of some of his most popular stories. 

“Red Candles and the Mermaid” is a story of human greed and revenge It is about a mermaid whose only wish is for her daughter to live a happy life. She decides to let her baby be brought up by humans because she heard “towns where human beings live are beautiful. People are kinder and more gentle than fish and beasts.” The daughter is brought up by an old couple who makes and sells candles in a small coastal town.

The daughter pays back their kindness by painting pictures on the candles. They sell really well and the shop becomes very prosperous. Rumors spread that if the candle is offered to the local shrine, ships would be protected at sea. However, the now rich couple are persuaded by a man to sell the girl knowing she is not human. The daughter begs her parents not to sell her but her pleas fall on deaf ears. Still, the girl kept drawing and colored some of the last candles all in red.

Around midnight, a woman comes to the house wanting to buy a candle and is sold a red one. That night a huge storm came and a rumor soon spread that whenever there is a red candle burning at the shrine, a violent storm would come no matter how nice the weather. The candles became associated with bad luck. The old couple stopped selling candles and the town perished as well.

“The Cow Woman” is a story that incorporates Buddhist beliefs concerning the afterlife. The tale centers around a very tall and strong but gentle deaf woman. She has a son that she loves very much. She is very protective of him and she fears people making fun of him because of her disability and because the boy has no father. Even after her death, the mother continues to look after her only son. 

“The Lord’s Bowl” is a story about beauty and practicality. A famous potter is requested to make a bowl for the Lord of the land. The official tells the potter the bowl must be light and thin. The potter makes the bowl as light and thin as possible. When the official presents the bowl to the Lord, he asks, “How do you decide whether the bowl is good or not?” The official responds by saying, “The more light and thin, the better. A heavy and thick bowl is vulgar.” Unfortunately, the Lord isn’t pleased with the bowl. The potter is brought to the castle and instead of the praise he thought he would receive, is reprimanded for not being considerate or practical when making the bowl. 

This collection of twenty-five short stories will appeal to children and adults alike. Ogawa believed that his stories were written for people who never forgot the innocence of their youth. The stories will take you back to a world you may have forgotten and will once again stir your imagination. ~Ernie Hoyt

One Last Look by Susanna Moore (Knopf)

“No matter how loud I scream, no one can hear me,” Lady Eleanor Oliphant writes in her journal. Wracked with seasickness in a cramped and dirty ship’s cabin, she’s two months away from England and faces another month at sea before her journey ends at Calcutta. A half-century after England lost its American colonies, it’s turned its attention to India, where Eleanor’s brother Henry has been named Governor-General.

Accompanied by his sisters Eleanor and Harriet, Henry travels in squalor that’s just marginally different from what his company of soldiers and 84 hunting hounds experience below deck. He weathers it with stolid aplomb, Eleanor is almost incapacitated with misery and disgust, and Harriet is “having a lovely time.”

All three are greeted with a heady mixture of luxury and the unknown, which they face in the same way they endured their 100-day voyage. In “rooms as spare as a gibbet...a trifle less fiery than a kiln,” even their lapdog has its own servant and five men are employed in the simple task of Eleanor washing her hands. Their meals are heavy and British, and the sisters’ daily schedules are dominated by periods of rest. “There are no locks on the doors,” Eleanor observes, “indeed there are seldom doors,” and the floors outside of the bedrooms are covered with servants, sleeping.

Eleanor becomes lethargic and relies upon a sedan chair; her chief activity is observing what surrounds her and writing about it all in her journal. Harriet hurls herself into her new life with enthusiasm, collecting a lemur and a gazelle as pets, and “making a life for herself,” always in the company of her jemadur who serves as a butler and interpreter. Both sisters learn to deny themselves nothing,as they take on the privilege and richness of the lives led by Indian royalty. 

Henry discovers that the commercial ventures of the East Indian Company are possibly more important than political concerns. His colonial government rests upon financial success. When he discovers that the government in Kabul threatens the four million pounds a year that flows to England from the subcontinent, he decides to overthrow the current leader and replace him with someone more acquiescent, someone “Indian in skin, but English in thought, English in morals.”

Meanwhile Harriet returns from a tiger hunt with the habit of smoking a hookah filled with sweet grass, tobacco, and cardamom. Eleanor, plagued with savage headaches, is introduced to opium by the mother of a raja. For Christmas that year, Harriet gives her an ivory opium pipe. Eleanof’s gift to her sister is a bejeweled lotus-shaped mouthpiece for her hookah.

When Russia threatens England’s presence in Afghanistan and the Crown’s hold upon India, Henry makes a disastrous move. British women and other civilians are captured and imprisoned, while 700 soldiers are slaughtered in a surprise attack. The Great Game is imperiled and Henry is recalled from his post.

He returns to England as a marquis, his sisters come back indelibly transformed. While Henry was absorbed in matters of strategy and empire, Eleanor and Harriet discovered India’s secrets as best they could and are now “most unprepared for London,” where there are “no pearls, no monkeys, no betel...no color...no smell.” Neither of them is able to escape the changes that India has cast upon them.

Susanna Moore has mined the letters and diaries of Englishwomen living in India during the Raj. Her research is staggering and her details of daily life in 19th century India, along with the debacle of British foreign policy in that country, is told with the assured voice of someone who experienced this time and place herself. Through the words of Lady Eleanor, Moore takes the convention of the historical novel, twists it viciously and veils it with enormous subtlety. The result is a book that is decadent but never sensational, a story that’s sensuous, languid, and illuminating.~Janet Brown

Eternal Harvest : The Legacy of American Bombs in Laos by Karen J. Coates (ThingsAsian Press)

Many people do not know where Laos is located nor do they know its official name. It is the Lao People’s Democratic Republic and is a landlocked country in Southeast Asia bordered by Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, and Myanmar. It’s a beautiful and serene country. The people are very friendly and open but Laos is also a very dangerous country due to the amount of unexploded ordnance (UXO) that remain in the ground, left over from the Vietnam War.

“The U.S. military and its allies dumped more than six billion pounds of bombs across the land - more than one ton for every man, woman, and child in Laos at the time. American forces flew more than 580,000 bombing missions across the land, the equivalent of one raid every eight minutes for nine years.” “To this day, Laos remains, per capita, the most heavily bombed country on earth.” 

Eternal Harvest brings to light a problem still facing Laotians today. One of the most common types of munitions used were tiny bombs, called “bombies” which were designed to open in midair releasing smaller explosives over a large area to cause a maximum amount of damage. 

No one knows the exact numbers but even forty years after the end of the Vietnam War, many of these “bombies” didn’t explode on impact. “Millions of these submunitions fell into forests, where many lodged into treetops and scrub brush.” These bombies are the most common form of unexploded ordnance (UXO) and are very dangerous as well. Every year, around 100 to 150 people are injured or killed by UXO. 

Coates travels throughout Laos interviewing people who live with this constant everyday threat. She talks to farmers who have to work in their fields to grow food for their family. She meets people who search for UXO to make money from the scrap metal business and she interviews members of various bomb-disposal teams. 

Coates introduces us to Noi who was working in a field when a bomb exploded sending shrapnel into her face. She meets Lee Moua who makes utensils out of old bomb casings. She talks to Joy, a young boy with a metal detector he uses to look for scrap metal which could kill him. Coates also meets Jim Harris, a former elementary school principal from Wisconsin who gave up his job and now blows up bombs in Laos. 

This is one of the most fascinating books I’ve read about Laos, a country I had the opportunity to visit a couple of times. Coates makes me care about the people and the country. This would make a great compliment to people interested in learning more about America’s secret war in Laos and the effects it still has on the country today. It also makes you question why the United States government refuses to sign and ratify the Convention on Cluster Munitions which puts an international ban on the use of these weapons. As the country becomes more accessible to tourists, this book will make visitors more aware of the dangers of traveling off the beaten path. ~Ernie Hoyt

Available at ThingsAsian Books

A Dangerous Friend by Ward Just (Houghton Mifflin)

Sydney Parade comes to Saigon in 1965 as a civilian, believing that foreign aid is a form of nation building, and holding a devout faith in the domino theory. He’s employed by the Llewellyn Group, an organization formed by and connected to the U.S.government, existing outside of any chain of command. The Group is in Vietnam to facilitate the distribution of rice, the providing of vaccinations, the repairing of dikes, the building of roads and bridges and schools. Parade is told their victories will be reflected in the hearts and minds that their work will win, not in body counts, and he believes that. The man who tells him that does not.

Dicky Rostok is an ambitious cynic. His invisible agenda is based upon the principle that knowledge will give him mastery and power. His instrument in gaining this is Parade, whose family is loosely connected to Claude Armand, an owner of a rubber tree rubber plantation that’s close to enemy territory. 

“We’ve got to know things that the rest of them don’t know from a source of information they can’t figure out,” Rostock tells Parade, “And then Llewellyn Group will count for something. Not before.” Armand and his American wife are the ones whom Rostok is certain will give him the information that nobody else will have and it’s Parade’s job to get it.

The Armands live “between the lines.” To them the war is a nuisance that they would be able to ignore, if the American forces would only stop bombing their rubber trees. But the lines blur for them when an American plane is shot down near their home and a young American with political connections is captured. To deflect the glare of attention that this brings them, they give Parade information that will provide Rostok with his power while destroying lives, including their own.

“I will insist at the beginning that this is not a war story,” is the opening sentence of A Dangerous Friend, and the war remains peripheral throughout the novel. Instead it’s the story of people who give their hearts and lives to places they don’t understand, expatriates who believe that “when you have lived in a place and loved it that you belong to it.” But as Parade says to Madame Armand, “I’m thinking we live in different countries. I’ve invented one and you’ve invented another, and somewhere there’s a third that’s undiscovered.” Neither of them yet know what Parade’s father told him years earlier, “Thing about a foreign country, you never know what you don’t know.” They haven’t learned that acquiring this knowledge can be dangerous.

“There were many things that could be taken from you that were more precious than life.”  Rostok gets what he wants while other people lose their innocence, their homes, their faith.

Ward Just has written a companion novel to Graham Greene’s classic, The Quiet American. While both books show the destruction caused by ignorance mingled with power, Just’s novel is suffused with a love for Vietnam and for the people who believe it’s their home. It too deserves to be a classic.~Janet Brown

Shadow Family by Miyuki Miyabe (Kodansha)

Shadow Family is a murder mystery incorporating the world of Internet chat rooms where people gather and pretend to be whoever they want to be. The story starts off with the investigation into two murders in two different locations but evidence suggests that they were killed by the same person. 

Shadow Family was originally published in the Japanese language in 2001 with the title R.P.G. At the beginning of this book we are given a short definition of the term role-playing: “A method of learning in which real life situations are acted out; by playing various imaginary roles, participants master techniques of problem-solving.” 

The victims are a middle-aged businessman named Ryosukie Tokoroda and a young woman  named Naoko Imai who was found strangled to death near her place of work. As the deaths took place far apart from each other, the police at first do not think they are related. However, the police do think there may be a serial killer on the loose picking victims at random. 

During the investigation, The police discover that Tokoroda’s family dynamics were less than ideal. The father had numerous affairs which the wife knew about and he was estranged from his teenage daughter. The police find that “Ryosuke Tokoroda had created an “alternate” family on the Internet.” Tokoroda has taken the role of “Dad”. The family also consists of “Mom”, a daughter named “Kasumi”, the same name as his daughter, and a son named “Minoru”. 

Tokoroda had more interaction with his Internet family than he did with his own. He is able to give comfort and be supportive of them than his own family. Around the time of Tokoroda’s murder, his  real-life daughter had been given police protection after telling her family that someone has been stalking her.

The police do find a connection between Imai and Tokoroda. Three years prior, when Naoko Imai was still a junior in high school, she worked part-time for a company called Orion Foods. The same company that Ryosuke Tokoroda worked for. The police have also found a trail of emails which they use to reconstruct this online family life. 

The cops have their number one suspect - Miss A, who was acquainted with both Tokoroda and Imai and has the motive to kill them. However, the evidence against her is circumstantial at best and she is released from police custody. The police then change the direction of the investigation. They decide to bring in the “shadow family” for questioning as they have determined that the family has met offline. The police also bring in Tokoroda’s wife and daughter to the precinct and have the daughter watch the proceedings from behind a one-way mirror. 

Miyabe creates a story that’s compelling as it is complicated. As the investigation nears its end, it may take you by surprise. I was hooked from the opening pages until the end where the truth finally comes to light. It’s a psychological thriller where reality and fantasy are intertwined. A story to keep you guessing “whodunnit?”. ~Ernie Hoyt

White Ghost Girls by Alice Greenway (Black Cat/Grove Atlantic)

Hong Kong in the summer of 1967: Across the border, above the line where the New Territories meet mainland China, Red Guards rampage in their goal to purify Mao’s revolution. Hungry mainlanders plunge into the sea, hoping to swim to Hong Kong.  And only a short plane ride away from the peace and prosperity of England’s prize colony, a war rages in Vietnam.

Kate and her older sister Frankie are Americans in Hong Kong, endowed with a wild freedom that’s bred by their home country and fostered by benign neglect. Their father is a photographer for Time/Life, his lens and his attention claimed by Vietnam. Their mother is a beautiful practitioner of selective blindness, an artist whose paintings are “light, pretty, airy,” drenched in “the charm and comforts of the colonial era.” Ah Bing, the girls’ amah, is the only one to provide attempts at discipline, buttressed with Cantonese curses and epithets, but she’s old and too slow to keep up with her gwaimui, her white ghost girls.

Frankie and Kate escape to the beach, building shelters from whatever is washed up by the sea, playing Castaway, calling themselves secret sisters, Viet Cong sisters. They know they’re too old for the games they play; Kate is thirteen, Frankie is nubile--or as a friend of her father’s remarks, voluptuous. Both girls are feral and neither wants to grow up.

Then comes the day that they find a woman’s body floating in the sea, “swollen and bloated like a buoy,” a peasant who tried to swim to freedom and failed. They see students march in protest through the city streets, holding up pictures of Mao. When they accompany Ah Bing to a Kwan Yin temple on a nearby island, they run away, bump into a Red Guard demonstration in a market, and leave when they see the police are on their way. As they begin their return to the temple, the girls are accosted by two men who grab Frankie and  give Kate a bag, Lychees, she’s told, a gift for the captain of the police boat. “You no come back, you no big sister.”

Terrified, Kate ends up throwing the bag into a garbage can near the market and hears it explode as she rushes back to Frankie. Neither girl has been hurt. Both of them are changed. Kate, feeling responsible for the death and injuries incurred by the explosion, becomes secretive. Frankie, molested by her captors, has discovered her sexual power. The summer darkens and takes on a dreadful momentum that their parents fail to recognize nor even notice.

White Ghost Girls is a story of loss and grief, a love letter to a vanished home written by an exile, a eulogy for a girl who would never leave Hong Kong. Alice Greenway, who also grew up in Hong Kong during the 60s, illuminates the city with a sense of place that’s meticulous, visceral, and wistful.

“Can you give me hot rain, mould-streaked walls, a sharpness that creeps into my clothes...The smells of dried oyster, clove hair oil, tiger balm...The feverish shriek of cicadas, the cry of black-eared kites?” Kate begins her story with these questions and ends with this answer. 

…”this is all I want: a wooden stool, a bowl of rice, an army canteen, a secret comrade, the whooping cry of wild gibbons,” the summer when her Viet Cong sister left her forever.~Janet Brown

Voices from the Snow by Hideo Osabe and Kyozo Takagi (Hirosaki University Press)

Voices from the Snow : Tsugaru in Legend, Literature and Fact is “an attempt to present a picture of life in Tsugaru as it once was and to some extent still is, by means of literary documents and traditional materials alternated with scholarly essays.” The book was translated and edited by James N. Westerhoven who is a Professor of American Literature at Hirosaki University and has also translated the works of Osamu Dazai and Nitta Jiro into English and has also translated the works of Haruki Murakami and Yukio Mishima in his native tongue of Dutch. Tsugaru is located at the northern end of Honshu island of Japan. During the Edo Period, it was part of the Tsugaru Domain whose capital was Hirosaki and was ruled by the Tsugaru clan. It is often considered the backside of Japan. “Because of its distance from Tokyo, its long history of isolation, and its impenetrable dialect, Tsugaru even nowadays has a backward image.”  Although Tsugaru still has a backwater image, it is home to two of Japan’s cultural assets - writer Osamu Dazai, who was born here, and the Tsugaru shamisen, a three-stringed instrument that originated in China.

Three of the most well known stories of Tsugaru were written by Hideo Osabe - Tsugaru Jonkarabushi, Yosarebushi, and A Voice in the Snow. Jonkarabushi and Yosarebushi are both stories about the songs that are played on the Tsuguru shamisen which also has a long history of its own. A Voice in the Snow is a short murder mystery in which a suspect commits a crime because of her belief in an itako.

The stories by Kyozo Takagi include Grannies’ Lodge and Yosaburo’s House. Both stories are about ordinary life in Tsugaru and appear here for the first time in English. In order to truly appreciate the stories, it helps to have a little background about the people and practices that are native to the region such as the gomiso and itako. 

Takefusa Takamori, a Professor of Ethnomusicology at Hirosaki Gakuin University, whose research focuses on folk performing arts and the music of Tsugaru gives us insight into the practices of the itako and gomiso who are considered to have shaman-like ability. The itako are blind or nearly blind mediums who are all women and must be trained by older itako. They are believed to be able to communicate with the dead. The gomiso have their regular eyesight and do not require any training but also act as a medium and also interpret people’s dreams. 

Although Voices from the Snow is a University publication, it is written for the layperson in easy to understand prose. Many of the stories can be enjoyed in English for the first time and will give the reader a better understanding of what life was like on the outer fringe of Japan up north. I find that the longer I live in Aomori City, located in Tsugaru, the more curious I am about its literature and history. The book is absorbing and informative and the stories and essays have made me an even bigger fan of my adopted hometown! ~Ernie Hoyt

Leaving Thailand: A Memoir by Steve Rosse

Back in the early ‘90s. Steve Rosse had it all. He lived in an island paradise in the south of Thailand, he had his choice of women who were attractive and acquiescent. His job as a public relations manager for an upscale resort ensured that he would eat well, drink well, and meet everyone in the world, from royalty to scalawags. As a columnist for one of Thailand’s two leading English-language newspapers, his name was widely known and his face appeared on Bangkok billboards. He had conquered the hurdles that cause most foreigners to lose sleep and gain ulcers—an extendable visa and a work permit.  With a life so idyllic, what could go wrong?

The answer to this question, Rosse tells readers in his honest, funny, and self-deprecating memoir, is summed up in one word. Everything.

In a gradual descent, he loses the woman who could have been the love of his life, marries another who becomes the scourge of it, and takes an ill-advised publicity photo that shows the Crown Prince of Denmark in close proximity to a pack of Marlboros. The fact that the Marlboros belong to Rosse’s boss and not the prince means nothing. Suddenly Rosse has no job, two children, and a wife who may be loathsome but is certainly pragmatic. Her suggestion that they move to the States removes Rosse from a place he loves to an existence in Iowa and puts him into a permanent state of culture shock and longing that he’s never recovered from.

Fortunately he has never lost his skill with words or his sense of humor. “Listen,” he says, in his opening sentence. “Let me tell you a story.” While in real life, those words would make most people run for the nearest exit, here they’re an irresistible invitation to another world. Rosse is a natural-born storyteller and Leaving Thailand is a remarkable collection of stories, some of them heartbreaking, some of them bawdy, all of them captivating.

From his welcome to Thailand, which involves an act of petty larceny after a night of serious drinking, an act of carnal knowledge with someone of dubious gender, and an act of extended bliss that leaves Rosse with a somewhat humiliating virus, right up to a poignant essay on his retirement plans that feature a house on a bluff near a temple and a massage parlor, he doesn’t miss a beat. There’s no self-pity here and no disrespect for anyone he meets, including his former wife. He tells about bar girls he has known in the Biblical sense while honoring them in some whole other sense and writes tender essays about his son that are sweet but never mawkish. He puts himself in the heart and mind of a Thai-born cafeteria lady who’s made a home in a cold country and breaks the heart of anyone who reads about his Burmese maid whose life he may have ruined with a few careless words. 

There are many books written by white men about their lives in Thailand. Leaving Thailand roams through much of their territory, expands it, and claims it. And as for its author, as he reveals himself? Let’s give him the last word on who he is--”Not bad. Not good. Just...thus.”~Janet Brown

Kim by Rudyard Kipling (Everyman's Library)

Kim is one of Rudyard Kipling’s best known characters in one of his best known novels. It was first published as a serial in McClure’s Magazine and in Cassell’s Magazine. It was published in book form for the first time by McMillan & Co. in 1901. It is the story of a young boy’s coming of age and his recruitment into the Indian secret service to take part in the Great Game in British India during the late 19th century.

“Though he was burned black as any native, though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazar; Kim was white.”  Kim is the orphaned son of an Irish soldier and a poor Irish mother and was raised by a half-caste Indian woman. He wanders the streets of Lahore and treats everybody equally and has garnered the nickname “Friend of All the World”. 

Kim befriends a Tibetan lama and becomes the man’s chela or disciple. They travel together, each having their own quest. Before Kim sets off on the pilgrimage, he visits Mahbub Ali, an Aghan horse-trader, who he has done odd jobs for in the past.

In exchange for a bit of money, Ali gives Kim the task of carrying a mysterious message to an officer named Colonel Creighton in Umballa, a town located between Lahore and Benares. Kim is to say to the Englishman, “The pedigree of the white stallion is fully established” and to pass on a folded piece of paper with a coded message. Kim deduces that there is more to Ali than just being a horse-trader and is determined to solve the mystery. 

On their journey, Kim and the lama come across a British regiment. Their flag depicts a red bull on a green field, an image Kim was told about in his childhood. His father said to him if he ever sees this image, the people it represents would help him. The chaplain of the regiment discovers that Kim is the son of one of the regiment’s former soldiers and takes Kim away from the lama and sends him to an English school to be properly educated. 

Kim spends three years other than tutelage of the British but yearns to return to the lama and help him complete his quest. However, the British have other plans for him. Kim is appointed to a government job and is trained to join the Great Game. A term given to the political game played out by the British Empire against the Russian Empire in seizing control of Afghanistan and other surrounding Central Asia countries. It is the 19th century version of the Cold War.

Kipling brings to life the intrigue of international espionage in the Raj’s however, the most compelling thing about Kim is India itself - the people, the customs, the interactions among races and religions, all under the rule of a foreign power. The story is written in prose that can be described as poetry in motion. Kim may not be James Bond and Kipling certainly isn’t an Ian Fleming, but the spy story that emerges will make you want to read the book over and over again. ~Ernie Hoyt

From a Chinese City by Gontran de Poncins (Trackless Sands Press)

Vietnam was enjoying a brief respite of peace when Gontran do Poncins came to visit. The French had been vanquished in 1954 and the Americans hadn’t yet begun to buttress their domino theory with armed troops. In February of 1955 de Poncins arrived, a travel writer who had achieved acclaim for Kabloona, his account of living with the Canadian Eskimo for fifteen months. During his northern stay, de Poncins practiced total immersion, living, eating, and behaving as did his hosts, to the point that he completed a 1400-mile trip across the Arctic behind a dog sled. 

When he decides to spend four months in Vietnam, he chooses to stay in the Chinese city of Cholon, no doubt expecting to be able to replicate the success of his time with the Eskimos. Unfortunately he fails.

Cholon at the time of de Poncins’ arrival was a city of 650,000. Although its neighbor, Saigon, had been heavily influenced by its French colonizers, Cholon remained Chinese. As de Poncins was told at the onset of his stay, “Cholon ignores the West and has no desire to mingle with it.”

“Cholon is the Chinese pleasure city,” de Poncins says, filled with nightclubs, opium dens, restaurants, and gambling hells, but he soon discovers that’s for “the white man hankering for orientalism.” The Cholon he lives in is devoid of luxury. His world is defined by his hotel; its rooms are barebones-basic with open doors and an entire town flourishes in its lobby. As was true in his life with the Eskimos, de Poncins is immersed in a life without privacy; his door is expected to be open and anyone is free to peek inside at will. On the other hand, he’s free to observe those around him as ravenously as others do him

The staff of the hotel are puzzled. No matter what comforts are offered to him--boy, girl, opium--de Poncins refuses them. His interest is taken up by the streets outside and the life that courses through them. Every day he sits, watches, sketches, and writes about what he sees and gradually the pace and routine of the city becomes vivid. 

It isn’t always pretty. Although de Poncins is quite lyrical about the special sounds that announce the coming of street vendors and tradesmen, the beauty of the food displays, the grace of the river sampans, the ‘enchantment of form,” his drawings of the people around him are crude caricatures. When he shows them to people in his hotel who have asked to see, they turn away without comment. 

As much as he’s an indefatigable chronicler of everything that meets his eye, de Poncins is a master of generalization--”the Chinese,” he says and then launches into an idiosyncrasy that he believes he understands. As he watches laborers in the streets, he wonders if they perhaps aren’t of “a different species” from his own.

He tries valiantly to go deeper. A man who can speak several languages other than French, he attempts to learn Chinese without success. His wish to meet a Chinese woman of culture and breeding is laughed down by his friends as being impossible but this doesn’t keep him from expounding upon the virtues of Chinese women and the “wisdom” of the Chinese institution of marriage.

But de Poncins, in spite of the briefness of his time there, gives a cinematographer’s view of Cholon’s streets. His gift of observation is enviable--if only he’d carried a camera instead of a pen and paper. Even so, readers who wade past his condescension and superficial conclusions are shown a portion of a city that has no doubt vanished with only a few traces left behind.~Janet Brown

Out by Natsuo Kirino (Kodansha)

Out is a gruesome murder mystery centering on the relationship of four women who work the graveyard-shift in a boxed-lunch factory. The book was first published in 1997 and won the Mystery Writers of Japan Award for Best Novel that year. It is Natsuo Kirino’s first novel to be translated into English and was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Novel in 2004. 

The four women are Yayoi Yamamoto, Yoshie Azuma, Kuniko Jonouchi, and Masako Katori. Yayoi is the youngest of the four and is married and has two children. Yoshie, who the other three call the Skipper, is a widower in her late fifties, who also cares for her bedridden mother-in-law. Kuniko is an overweight woman who enjoys living beyond her means and is trying to keep one step ahead of a loan shark. Masako is a married woman who is estranged from her husband and teenage son. 

Yayoi’s husband is a good-for-nothing gambler, womanizer, and wife-beater. He has dwindled the family account to nearly zero. He is also stalking a hostess named Anna who works as a hostess at a club called Mika in Shinjuku’s Kabukicho District. Anna is the girlfriend of the club owner who also runs an illegal gambling casino called Kunimatsu in the same building.

The club owner’s name is Satake. Satake has a dark history of his own. He once killed a woman in a most violent fashion and spent seven years in prison for the crime. Satake is convinced he needs to keep a low profile in his businesses due to his prison record. Currently, Satake must deal with a problem customer at both of his establishments who happens to be Yayoi’s husband. 

Yayoi is looking at her bruised body caused by her husband’s violence and she’s overcome by a very powerful emotion - hatred. The following evening Yayoi has another argument with her husband. When he says, “Can’t you be nice once in a while?”, it enrages her and she strangles her husband to death with her belt. Yayoi sits and looks at her dead husband and says out loud, “Couldn't you have been nice once in a while?”

What is Yayoi to do? She confides in Masako who recruits the Skipper and Kuniko to help dispose of the husband’s body by cutting it up and throwing the bagged body parts away in different areas of the city. Unfortunately, the police have found some of the bags and now they are investigating the murder. 

Their number one suspect is Satake, as the police have found Yayoi’s husband’s coat at the casino and have witnesses who saw Satake and Yayoi’s husband fighting.  Satake is arrested and confined for nearly a month but is released due to a lack of evidence. During his incarceration, he loses both businesses and now he’s out for revenge. 

Kirino draws the reader into the seedier side of Japan. The story is set in a modern Japan that few foreigners see. A city full of host clubs, Yakuza, and loan sharks.The story will appeal to fans of suspense-thrillers and true crime.  I couldn’t put the book down. Will the women get away with murder? Will Satake find them and take his revenge? Or, will the police solve the crime before there is another death? ~Ernie Hoyt

China Syndrome by Karl Taro Greenfield (Harper Perennial)

A rapid soar in vinegar sales was the first warning. In Southern China, because boiling vinegar is an air purification method that’s used to combat respiratory illness. Soon the Heyuan Daily reported that antibiotics and herbal medicines were also being purchased in unprecedented amounts, but the paper assured its readers there was no fear of an epidemic. Then all news of any illness disappeared.

But when a Hong Kong  hospital head prepared to attend a conference in the southern city of Guangzhou, a Chinese physician said, “Don’t come. Something bad is going on here.” A month earlier, at an influenza conference in Beijing attended by World Health Organization officials, clinicians from the province of Guangdong in southern China had reported an influenza outbreak that had “people dying like flies.” 

These bits of information were all that surfaced and only virologists paid attention. When birds were found dead in a Hong Kong wetlands refuge, virologists from the University of Hong Kong grew alarmed. In 1997, the avian flu, H5N1, had jumped species from birds to humans. It had been contained but its threat was still a vivid memory.  Bird feces were tested for this virus. It wasn’t there.

In the border city of Shenzhen, a worker in a “Wild Flavor” restaurant, where wild animals were killed to order and cooked on the spot, had come down with a severe respiratory illness that swiftly spread to hospital staff. However, China has “thousands of unexplained respiratory cases a year” and Guangdong, where the bulk of these cases appeared, is the same size as Germany. A couple of hundred cases across the province excited little attention. It wasn’t until an infected doctor unwittingly spread the illness on a trip to Hong Kong that attention became focused upon it. Tourists who had stayed in his hotel carried it across the Pacific when they flew back to the United States. 

Now there was a potential global epidemic brewing, “a biological Armageddon.” The virus was soon in six different countries.  It was isolated and identified as a coronavirus, never before found in humans, and was given a name, SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome.

Karl Taro Greenfield was the editor of Time Asia, based in Hong Kong when SARS struck. In China Syndrome he gives a horrifying account of how an epidemic spreads, from descriptions of victims who didn’t have enough energy to blink or twitch their facial muscles, whose countenances were completely blank, to Beijing’s suppression of information as its citizens died, in order to safeguard the economic boost that comes with the Spring Festival. Greenfield explains the popularity of  “Wild Flavor” restaurants whose dishes of exotic animals from around the world are believed to confer good luck and prosperity--as well as enhanced social status-- upon the diner, and tells how the wild animal markets were closed after they were proved to be a source of the coronavirus, only to reopen months later. And he poses the question: Why do viruses that are programmed to kill jump species and focus their efforts upon humans? 

China Syndrome should have been a wake-up call. Covid-19 is, according to WHO, “genetically related to the coronavirus responsible for the SARS outbreak of 2003. While related, the two viruses are different.” But, as humanity did with the Influenza of 2018, SARS was dismissed from public attention as soon as it disappeared. China Syndrome should be required reading around the world, especially for global leaders.~Janet Brown

Getting Genki in Japan : The Adventures and Misadventures of an American Family in Tokyo by Karen Pond (Tuttle)

Karen Pond and her family, which includes a husband and three sons, pack their belongings for an impending move because the father has accepted a new position in his company. However, the family is not moving across town or to another state. No, they are moving to one of the world’s largest cities located in a foreign country. They are moving to Tokyo, Japan. A city as different as night and day compared to their coastal hometown in Maine

Pond may sound a bit flustered and out of her element in her delightful book Getting Genki in Japan, a collection of articles which were previously published in INTOUCH, a monthly magazine of the Tokyo American Club, and also published in Tokyo Families Magazine. The stories are full of humor and include beautiful illustrations by Akiko Saito.

Pond is baffled by the high-tech washlets she finds in the bathroom of a department store. She learns to leave her inhibitions at the door when she has her first hot spring experience. She waltzes out of a bathroom still wearing the toilet slippers. She uses gestures at a pharmacy to get medicine for a stomach ache for her husband and feels triumphant when the pharmacist says, “Wakarimashita” (I understand). However, she didn’t bring her husband home antacid medicine. She bought her husband a pregnancy test!

At a company dinner, Pond mistakes edamame (green soybeans) for a peapod and eats the whole pod instead of squeezing out the beans. One of her husband’s colleagues says to her, “We are curious about something. In Japan, we squeeze the edamame bean into the mouth like this. We would never eat the whole bean. It is very fascinating that in your culture you eat the whole bean.” In order to spare herself from embarrassment, she responds by saying, “This is exactly how I eat edamame in my area of the States. It’s tradition, really. It is good for the character. Mmmmmmm….” 

Of course the biggest difficulty she must overcome is the language barrier. Some of her language follies include introducing her husband as her shuujin which translates to “prisoner”, the proper word being shujin. Or telling a Japanese mother that her child is kowai (scary) instead of kawaii (cute). She doesn’t realize that irashaimasse means “welcome” and not “please take off your shoes''. The language barrier rears its ugly head again when Pond orders cocoa using the English pronunciation of “koko” which means “here” instead of “ko-ko-aah” as it’s pronounced in Japanese.

As an expat living in Japan myself, I can relate to many of the situations Pond finds herself in. I once ate soramame (broad bean), skin and all before my friend told me I am supposed to squeeze out the bean inside. Many of her stories made me laugh out loud.  Some of her anecdotes may be exaggerated for maximum humorous effect and at times her lack of common sense borders on the unbelievable. However, the book is light-hearted and easy to read and is an entertaining romp that will appeal to foreign residents and first-time visitors to Japan alike. ようこうそ日本へ！Welcome to Japan! ~Ernie Hoyt

A Nail the Evening Hangs on by Monica Sok (Copper Canyon Press)

“Who is this history written for,” Monica Sok asks when she reads about Cambodia. “Is it written for me?”  In her book of poems, A Nail the Evening Hangs On, Sok writes for and about her family, people who survived a time “when family was being destroyed.”

Sok chronicles the words of survivors without ever mentioning the names of the force that tore Cambodia apart. She tells of an afternoon in 1998  when she and her brother were sent outside to play as her parents sit in front of the television, watching “an old man die in his bed.” Only the title reveals that the dying man was Pol Pot.

Words her parents have told her are fired like bullets in her poetry. Sisters search for water but instead “find, full of air, a balloon...swollen in the river.” A man who survives through lies stays awake in the dark: “I thought I heard escape.” A woman watches her husband, “the last historian,” scratch words with a stick onto tree bark; “he burns a dangerous light.”

After the war, Khmer fishermen poison egrets to sell at Thai border markets, “knowing the pendulum of war could swing anytime...They were sure it wasn’t over.” The egrets let them  have food to ration, to save in case they needed to leave again.

In Pennsylvania, Sok’s grandmother weaves silk on her loom, “her hair falls, not as the rain does but as nails the evening hangs on.” Her silk received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. It’s shown on the cover of Sok’s book, saffron and deep turquoise, its texture palpable in the photograph, holding memories and promises, loss and sorrow, transformed into beauty.

Sok has spoken in an interview of “Cambodian experience contextualized to fit into an American gaze.” On her visits to Cambodia, her own gaze is divided by her family’s history and her American upbringing. Eating foie gras prepared by a French chef in Siem Reap, she’s watched by a local family having a meal in their shop, wondering if she, “sitting so fancy on a restaurant patio alone,” is Khmer. “In America I don’t get to do this rich people thing.” In Cambodia, Sok is unable to stomach it, vomiting it up  as she rushes to the toilet. In a Phnom Penh hotel with other university students from the U.S., she says, “The Americans hate me and I hate them, but they’re the only students with me, and maybe I’m American too.” It’s the time of the Water Festival and as people crowd onto a bridge to give their offerings to the river, there’s “a human stampede...347 reported dead, 755 injured.” On the following evening the American students go dancing at The Heart of Darkness, “they still don’t understand but I go with them anyway.”

Trauma, Sok reminds us, is passed down through DNA, “molecular scars in the genes.” But the “revolutionaries who wanted so-called Year Zero so bad” have been turned into mosquitoes, she’s told in Cambodia. “Don’t bend. Slap.”

“We can make our own  worlds as easily as we can laugh,” Sok has said in an interview. Her poetry reveals new worlds while remembering the old one, as her grandmother did when she turned her memories into radiant silk.~Janet Brown

Available from ThingsAsian Books

Slumdog Millionaire by Vikas Swarup (Penguin)

“I have been arrested. For winning a quiz show.” says Ram Mohammad Thomas, the hero of Vikas Swarup’s novel Slumdog Millionaire. This book was originally published as “Q&A” but was given a new title after the success of the movie adaptation. Ram Mohammad Thomas has successfully answered twelve questions correctly on India’s popular quiz show, “Who Will Win a Billion?” but the producers of the show think the only way he could have won is by cheating. 

Ram lives in Dharavi, one of the largest slums in the poorest area of Mumbai. The authorities come for him in the middle of the night. Arrests here are “as common as pickpockets on the local train.” This is an area where people are often carted off without any explanation. As Ram is led away, he hears a voice in the neighborhood say, “There goes another one”. 

Neil Johnson and Billy Nanda, two people involved with the quiz program come to the police station to talk to Ram. Johnson asks the show’s producer, Nanda if Ram even understands English to which he replies “How can you expect him to speak English? He’s just a dumb waiter in some godforsaken restaurant, for Chrissake!”

Johnson pleads with the police commissioner to help prove that Ram cheated on the quiz show. They do not take any notice of Ram who is still in the room because he is just a waiter and “waiters don’t understand English”. The commissioner asks what’s in it for him and Ram hears two words - “ten percent”. 

Ram is then taken away and is beaten and tortured for hours on end. Ram knows he will sign a confession statement if the beatings continue, however, before Ram can sign any statement, he is saved from the police by a woman who claims to be his lawyer and is immediately released from police custody.

The lawyer says she wants to help Ram prove he did not cheat on the show. She tells him she has a copy of the entire quiz show broadcast and says “If you didn’t cheat, I must know how you knew”. Ram tells her what he told the police, that he just knew the answers. He then begins to tell his story of how each question on the quiz show was related to an episode in his life. 

The life of Ram Mohammed Thomas reads like a Shakespearean tragedy blended with the comedy of the absurd. Fortune and misfortune rules his life. An orphan who has to use his brain and wits to survive and succeed in a very seedy world.

The story is humorous at times and can also be read as an indictment against India’s class system that still seems to be prevalent today. You cannot help but root for Ram in his case against the injustices of a highly corrupt system. You will laugh and you will cry and you may wish your life was just as lucky as Ram’s without having to deal with the misfortunes.. ~Ernie Hoyt

The End of October by Lawrence Wright (Knopf)

Reading The End of October as a novel brings on a strong case of deja vu. A leading epidemiologist travels to a refugee camp in Indonesia where he finds a hemorrhagic virus with a horrifying fatality rate has taken hold. Unfortunately the man who had driven him to this death site immediately goes on hajj to Mecca where three million potential victims are gathered. As cases begin to spread among the faithful, the holy city is cordoned off and the world begins to characterize this as a Muslim disease. 

As the general public learns of this new virus, the novel corresponds to what we’ve experienced in 2020. People rush to stores, frantically buying and hoarding groceries, pharmaceuticals, face masks, and guns. Schools are closed, hospitals accept only emergency cases, the National Guard is called into play. Shelter in place goes into effect. Separated from his U.S. family, the epidemiologist fights to return to them while desperately searching for the source of the virus and hoping to discover a vaccine. 

But this isn’t just another end-of-the-world potboiler. Lawrence Wright is a journalist who won the Pulitzer for his book on 9/11, The Looming Tower, and his latest book is more a work of investigative journalism than it is a novel—and it’s horrifyingly prescient. Researched and written long before the emergence of Covid-19, The End of October is filled with information about the history, behavior, and deadly potential of coronaviruses.

Unlike the scourge in this novel, Covid-19 is not an influenza virus, but a novel virus, one never found before in humans. This was also true of the Spanish Influenza of 1918, “a more dreadful adversary than...ever encountered, with victims that could be “fine at lunch, dead by dinner.” Wright’s fictional virus, the Spanish Influenza, and Covid-19 all share a deadly characteristic: They correspond to no previous strain and there’s no built-up immunity to them anywhere in the world.

Like Wright’s invented disaster,  Covid-19 is an RNA virus, part of a group that’s “constantly reinventing themselves over and over again in what’s called a “mutant swarm,” as Ebola did. 

The viral world is a daunting one, found in the ocean as well as on land. “A single liter of seawater contained about 100 billion of them, 90% of them unknown to man.” “More than 800 million viruses,” researchers say, “are deposited every day on every single meter of the earth’s surface. Most...preyed on bacteria, not humans.” 

Viruses are a large part of the natural world whose purpose hasn’t yet been discovered, infecting a cell and then using  “the energy of the cell for reproduction,” eventually turning the infected body “into a virus factory.” And historically viruses come in waves, with  a “cruel intermission” followed by a second wave that’s worse than the first, as was true of the Spanish Influenza.

Wright suggests viruses are a force of nature, untamable, capable of “consuming human history.” The 1918 epidemic took more lives than the combined deaths of combatants during World War I, yet that killer-lnfluenza was essentially erased from history, its terrible lessons ignored.

Perhaps The End of October will awaken humanity to the knowledge of what a pandemic is capable of doing. It could become the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of today’s world, with its fictional narrative drawing its readers’ attention to its careful research and horrifying, illuminating facts. Let us hope.~Janet Brown

Available from ThingsAsian Books