Such a Lovely Little War: Saigon 1961-63 by Marcelino Truong, translated by David Homel (Arsenal Pulp)

It was a normal 1960’s childhood in a Washington DC suburb, one filled with hula hoops, Play-Doh, and winter sledding “like a Peanuts cartoon…something that Norman Rockwell might imagine.” Suddenly this all changed and the Truong children were on their way back to Vietnam. Their father, a diplomat serving in the Vietnamese Embassy, was needed by President Diem, a career swerve that took his family from the land of “cherry pie, a corner store, and Coca-Cola” to Saigon, a city filled with soldiers and Skyraider warplanes, with a naval destroyer moored in the river.

Now the children eat pho at street stalls with the family’s driver, Chu Ba, while their French mother struggles to make her housemaid realize that fish sauce isn’t an ingredient in boeuf bourguignon. Their father becomes part of what American journalists call the “Diemocracy,” serving as the English translator for President Diem and becoming the director of Agence Vietnam-Presse. His children go swimming at the pool in the exclusive Cercle Sportif de Saigon, learn to live without glass in the windows of their modern apartment, and enact spirited battles with their captured crickets and Siamese fighting fish.

Western journalists come to report on the “lovely little war, with just enough adrenaline,” flying to battlegrounds for the day and returning to the peace of Saigon in time for dinner. Then an unsuccessful coup attempt by two Vietnamese fighter pilots brings the war to the capital and grenades become a routine danger. Caught in a traffic jam, the children and their mother smell “something charred” and learn later that it came from a monk who set himself on fire to protest what is now being called “the dirty war.”

This is too much for Madame Truong. Her nerves shatter, she becomes prey to manic depression, and the war enters the Truong home. The children overhear their parents’ bitter fights. Their driver is forced to sell his blood to cope with the rising inflation caused by the advent of U.S. troops. Soon he‘s drafted to serve as a soldier, one who rides at the front of an armored train.

Interspersed with this child’s view of the war is a concise history, much of it based on his father’s memories and excerpts from his mother’s letters to relatives in France. This provides a brief but detailed summary of the Diem regime, the machinations of Madame Nhu, the role of Catholicism in Vietnam, and the symbolism of the legendary Trung sisters. “We should have done it on our own, with American weapons but without their soldiers, the way the Communists did,” the father concludes years later.

The “graphic novel” format of this mingled memoir and history gives it a vivid depth that makes it emotionally wrenching, while the frequent use of Vietnamese sprinkled throughout the book gives it the feeling of watching a film with subtitles. Like Maus and Persepolis before it, Such a Lovely Little War takes what once were “comic books” into a whole new realm of literature, blending art and text to create another world of creative possibility and a work of art that should become a classic.~Janet Brown

Triage by Scott Anderson (Pan Books)

Kurdistan. Wikipedia describes it as “a roughly defined geo-cultural territory in Western Asia wherein the Kurds form a prominent majority population and the Kurdish culture, languages, and national identity have historically been based.” It is an area that covers northern Iraq, southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, and northern Syria. The Kurds, like the Palestinians, hope one day to establish their own independent country. 

Scott Anderson, a veteran war correspondent who grew up in Asia, mainly in Taiwan and South Korea, has set his novel Triage in Kurdistan in 1988. This is during the Anfal campaign, also known as the Kurdish genocide, which was carried out by Ba’athist party of Iraq shortly after the end of the Iran-Iraq War. 

Mark Walsh is a photojournalist, on assignment in Kurdistan with fellow war photographer and friend Colin. The story opens with Mark lying on his back looking up into the sky. “He didn’t hear the artillery shell, but he believed he saw it”. He shouts for his friend Colin who doesn’t answer. Mark knows he will die if he doesn’t move. 

He does manage to move but slips and falls in a nearby river. The next time he awakens, he finds himself in a makeshift hospital in a cave. As he regains consciousness and looks around, he realizes where he is - the Harir cave, “a forty-bed ward and an operating theater carved out of solid rock, with no ventilation, no running water, no medicine.” 

Mark has been to this cave on many occasions and was thinking of creating a photo-essay titled The Worst Hospital in the World. And now here he is, not as a photojournalist, but as a patient., one who had previously met Dr. Talzini, a Peshmurga, who runs the place. 

Mark knows that the Peshmurga are the military force of the Kurdistan Regional Government. He was told by Dr. Talzani that the meaning of Peshmerga is “those who face death”. Mark also knows that Dr. Talzani holds a number of colored tags which makes Dr. Talzani a triage doctor, triage meaning “deciding the order of treatments or casualties”. 

Fortunately for Mark, he survives and makes the long journey home to his Spanish girlfriend, Elena. Elena is happy that Mark is back but she becomes worried as he seems to have come home a changed man. She talks to her mother, who then calls her grandfather who was a renowned psychiatrist in Franco’s Spain. 

Once Elena’s grandfather is in the picture, the story becomes a bit more complicated. Although Elena was close to her grandfather in her childhood, this changed when she learned that he was a supporter of Francisco Franco and his government. He ran a psychiatric institute and many of his patients were war criminals. He was called the “Fascist Father Confessor.” She said, “if you had wiped out a village, if you had tortured people to death, all you had to do was go see Dr. Joaquin Morales at the Morales Institute for Psychological Purification, and he absolved you of all guilt.” Of course Elena doesn’t want her grandfather to help Mark and cannot understand why Mark thinks it may be beneficial to him.

The book was also adapted into a movie in 2009 starring Colin Farrell. It is about the psychological effects that war has on people, on both participants and victims. It is also about forgiveness and letting go, in a very powerful story about the under-reported aspects of war. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Silent Dead by Tetsuya Honda, translated by Giles Murray (Minotaur Books)

Reiko Himekawa is tall, beautiful, and ambitious. Not yet thirty, she’s already made her way up through the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department to the rank of lieutenant and is leader of a homicide squad. She’s famous--and in some quarters infamous—for the preternatural knowledge she can garner from a murder victim which has propelled her rapid ascent through the ranks. Men in equivalent positions find her talent a direct challenge to their own methodical case work. To them, Reiko’s intuition seems like a kind of parlor trick--but her flashes of insight prove essential to solving cases. Many resent her but they grudgingly admit that this new addition to the homicide department is pulling her own weight.

When a body wrapped in a blue tarp is found carelessly discarded in a residential neighborhood, the police are puzzled. Why was the corpse dumped in a spot where it would quickly be discovered and why does it have a long cut in its abdomen that was inflicted after death? Reiko comes up with a plausible theory and begins the investigation, one leading to a horrendous online group that pays to watch a killer who is an artist of murder.

Reiko has a weakness; she makes certain that she’s off the street by nightfall, particularly in the summer. An older squad leader discovers the reason for this and uses it to taunt her, hoping to break her nerve and diminish her success. Instead he forces Reiko to face her memories and conquer her fear, as the two of them vie to discover the grisly game and its star performer.

This novel opens with a chapter that may deter squeamish readers but none of the later scenes match it for brutality and horror. Unlike novels by other Japanese crime writers (Natsuo Kirino immediately comes to mind), Tetsuya Honda is more focused on detection than he is on blood and guts. Even the culminating scene when the killer and her director almost come up with another corpse is less revolting than the sights and smells that dominate the book’s first pages.

A cast of characters is listed before the story begins but this is insufficient. It gives the names of only the fourteen police who figure prominently in the novel. A host of victims and the people who knew them offers sixteen additional names to keep straight—compiling a list for quick reference is highly recommended.

Reiko, with her “all-too-perfect looks” and her fear of “hot summer nights,” is the sort of detective that call for a series and this is only the first of several novels in which she appears. Her rival and tormentor, Lieutenant Katsumata, is equally compelling and his understanding of Reiko’s psychology provides a scene that upstages even the bloody solution to the crime spree. With luck, he’ll be a figure in the series because he’s a much more interesting figure than the two police officers who lust after Reiko, (each in different ways).

An unexpected strength in The Silent Dead is its close attention to details that are especially helpful to readers who don’t know Tokyo or the intricacies of its police hierarchy. Tokyo neighborhoods are crisply and vividly described, to the point that, for the first time ever, I’d like to explore this city. Full points go to Giles Murray, the book’s translator, a man who lives in Tokyo and who is able to escape the stilted dialogue that pervades many English versions of Japanese novels. From the first sentence of this thriller, “A putrid rain was falling, turning the whole world gray,” to its last scene when Kumata pinpoints the startling reason for Reiko’s success, Murray’s translation comes alive for western readers while always maintaining a strong sense of a distant and unfamiliar culture. 

Both Honda and Murray have introduced a detective to watch out for and Reiko Himekawa thoroughly deserves her own television series. Japan gave her one. Are you listening, HBO?~Janet Brown

All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd (Picador)

All the Lovers in the Night was originally published in the Japanese language as Subete Mayonaka no Koibitotachi in 2011. It is the latest book by Mieko Kawakami to be published in English who first came to prominence on the international market with her book Breasts and Eggs (Asia by the Book, November 2021), published in 2020, followed by Heaven (Asia by the Book, July 2022), published in 2021. 

Her latest book focuses on a single woman living in Tokyo. Fuyuko Irie works as a freelance proofreader. Before that, she worked for a small publisher “that nobody ever heard of. Where they produced books that made you wonder who would ever read them”. It is the company where she started her career as a proofreader, “spending every moment of her day, from morning to night, hunting for mistakes.”

Irie is the type of person most people would classify as a social outcast. She has no friends, she rarely talks, and only speaks when she’s spoken to. The only thing that keeps her mind off her loneliness is walking by herself at night and looking at all the lights around her. “All of the lights of the night. The red light at the intersection, trembling as if wet, even though it isn’t raining. Streetlight after streetlight. Taillights trailing off into the distance. The soft glow from the windows. Phones in the hands of people just arriving home, and people just about to go somewhere.”

Her only friend seems to be her go-between between her and various publishers. Hijiri Ishikawa is almost the exact opposite of Irie. She’s young, beautiful, and full of energy. She wears the latest fashions and has a very active social life. She also has a reputation of being a loose woman and is described as difficult to work with. On the few occasions when Irie meets Hijiri for drinks, she usually lets Hijiri do most of the talking. 

One day, on her way home, Irie is talked into donating blood. Once she’s done and is filling out a survey, she catches a glimpse of her reflection in the window. What she sees there is “the dictionary definition of a miserable person.” It makes her think that she’s “just a miserable woman, who couldn’t even enjoy herself on a gorgeous day.” After that, Irie is determined to change her lifestyle.

She starts slowly by drinking a can of beer a day. With the help of alcohol, she’s able to come out of her usual shell. She even goes to a cultural center to see if there might be a class she would be interested in taking. Before she makes a decision, she feels a bit nauseous and heads to the ladies room. She doesn’t quite make it and vomits before she can get to a sink. At about the same time, a man exits the men’s room and Irie believes she threw up on his shoes. 

From this embarrassing incident, she meets Mitsutsuka. At first, they are both awkward with each other but over time, they develop a friendship. Irie feels something a bit more and she’s not sure how to go about expressing herself to Mitsusuka. 

As any single person living in a large city may know, at times it can be difficult to meet that person of your dreams—or even someone you just want to spend more time with. Kawakami writes with the average, everyday person in mind. Sometimes you may need a little push from your friends or acquaintances or some experience to take that first step in finding happiness. Even I spent my first year in Tokyo alone and experienced my first Christmas in my cold and sparse apartment watching a Christmas video while eating a seven-eleven burrito. I felt the same as Irie and thought I really need to get out more and interact with people. It was that sad Christmas that made me search for happiness and I’m happy to say that I was able to tear down my own walls. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara (W.W. Norton & Company)

Born with his eyes wide open to a mother who died soon after his birth and a father who is disliked even by his own family, the ugly new baby needs an advantage and his stepmother provides it. Raj, she calls him, and his educated uncle gives the name its English translation, King.

King Rao is “a big name for a little runt,” his family says, but within a matter of years the boy lives up to it. Through cleverness and chicanery his grandfather became owner of a coconut farm, even though he is a Dalit, one of the Untouchables. King Rao is the smartest of the grandchildren and he’s told often that someday Rao’s Garden will belong to him. 

This never happens. King Rao is sent to school, moves on to a university, and is sent to the U.S. for graduate school. Out of a village that is “a hot wet nothing,” comes a man who will change the world and will ultimately preside over it. 

Already known as a programming genius in India, in the U.S. King Rao becomes a software programmer who makes personal computers a staple in every household. He learns how to collect and use data in a way that gives him unprecedented power. When nationalism threatens to destroy the world, he presents his plan: Shareholder Government that unites every country and is guided by the Master Algorithm. “Algo” makes decisions based on the data provided by the Social Profiles that every Shareholder, as in every person on earth, has from birth. The most successful Shareholders sit on the Board of Corporations and the chairman of the board is King Rao, a man who has taken on the status of a god but who is human enough to fall.

It’s his own mind that’s to blame for his ouster. King Rao has developed a means to connect human brains to the Internet but fails to realize that old brains no longer have the plasticity to make this happen. People die, King Rao evades responsibility, and a revolution is averted only by his voluntary exile.

Although this may sound like a run of the mill dystopian novel, Vauhini Vara isn’t the sort of writer to follow that path. She’s braided together three separate strands that take their turns in forming an intricate and diabolically clever plot. Life on the coconut farm with its traditions and inevitable dissolution continually alternates with King Rao’s rise, success, and eventual dethronement in the outside world, and then lapses into the idyllic life he shares with his young daughter on a lonely island. 

Once again hubris gets in the way. King Rao has given his daughter the Internet connection that once led to his downfall but even more dangerously, he has devised a way to filter his mind into hers. Not only is Athena constantly deluged with the Internet, she’s also a receptacle for her father’s brain--his thoughts, his memories, his consciousness. As all this flows into her,  King Rao quite literally begins to lose his mind.

Athena escapes, but with a terrible and inescapable knowledge. Like the system it toppled, Shareholder Government is based on consumption which has brought the planet to Hothouse Earth. Ever-increasing temperatures will destroy the world in a few generations unless corporate greed is stopped. She’s also the only one who knows that King Rao is not immortal.

Vara has constructed a heart-wrenching tragedy that has nothing to do with her human characters. It’s the beauty of the world, in Rao’s Garden and on the dreamlike island that demands our love and grief. “The sun, spraying its sweet, glittering light;” the intricate white lace that covers the world and enchanted an astronaut when he viewed the earth’s clouds from outer space; the beauty of an island that has been reclaimed by forests and fields of ferns that reach shoulder-high, where raccoons and deer have no reason to be afraid; a Garden with a thousand trees, each one of them a source of food. 

The Immortal King Rao holds too many facets of contemporary life to be seen only as a novel. Vara, who was once a technology reporter for the Wall Street Journal and then business editor of The New Yorker, isn’t just an astute observer. She’s put the pieces together in a way that feels uncomfortably like a prophecy—and a tragedy. This is a book that will keep you awake at night, staring into the dark and looking for answers.~Janet Brown

The Dragon Hunt : Five Stories by Tran Vu, translated by Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Duong (Hyperion]

The Dragon Hunt Is a collection of five short stories, some of which are based upon the life of writer Tran Vu. The stories were translated from the Vietnamese language by Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Duong. A couple of the stories have previously been published in other periodicals. 

The lead story, The Coral Reef, was first published in Granta: Fifty in the summer of 1995. The second story in the collection, Gunboat on the Yangtze is a slightly altered translation that first appeared in the anthology Night, Again : Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam which was published by Seven Stories Press in 1996. 

The Coral Reef is about a boat full of refugees that runs aground on a coral reef. The crew and passengers do their best to free the boat from the reef but their efforts seem to be in vain. After the first day of being stranded, there are already changes in the people as they scramble to find food and provisions from the wreckage and think only of their own survival. 

The Coral Reef was based on an incident in Tran Vu’s life. Tran was born in Saigon in 1962. When he was sixteen, he and his older brother fled Vietnam on a boat. The war was over but the siblings didn’t feel safe with the communist government. Their boat, filled with four hundred passengers, was shipwrecked on a coral reef. 

Tran escaped through a porthole and survived in the ocean for ten days, thanks to the life jacket that was given to him by his mother, who stayed in Vietnam. He was a refugee in the Philippines until he was granted asylum in France where he currently lives. 

Gunboat on the Yangtze is a disturbing story about a disfigured boy named Toan, and his elder sister who currently live in a small house in Paris. The boy suffers from extreme loneliness so his sister promises to find him a girlfriend. Once Elder Sister’s friend sees Little Brother’s face, she screams and storms out of the house, yelling for help. Even after leaving the house, “her ghoulish scream haunted the corridor for a long time.”

Elder Sister gives in to her brother’s demand about being loved and they start an incestuous relationship. Things get a bit more complicated when Toan says he wants to have a child of his own. What happens between them defies the imagination.

Hoi An is the setting for a love triangle between a married woman, a servant girl, and the man who lives in the same house with the married woman, although in a different rented room. Hoi An is a small forgotten town in central Vietnam. The married woman’s husband is an archeologist and has moved his family to Hoi An to continue his research into the Cham and Sa Huynh people. The husband seems to be oblivious of his wife’s actions which makes her bold and dangerous at the same time. 

Nha Nam is a story where Vu mimics the style of a well-known Vietnamese writer named Nguyen Huy Thiep. Vu’s story was inspired by Thiep’s Nha Nam Rain, but Vu points out that the two stories have nothing in common besides their titles. Vu says that Nha Nam translates to Delicate South and is both ancient Vietnam and the Vietnam of today.

The final story which the book takes its name from is about a group of Vietnamese exiles who gather together in a European nation to kill dragons and eat their flesh. In Vu’s notes he mentions The Dragon Hunt is a metaphor for the divide between North and South of Vietnam, not in the sense of a nation, but as a people. It’s the difference between those who remained in the country and those who left. 

This book is a good introduction to contemporary Vietnamese fiction. Vu’s own experiences add to the realism of his stories. Although a very short book, it will impress you enough to want more. ~Ernie Hoyt

Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road by Kate Harris (HarperCollins Publishers)

Kate Harris, like many of us, was struck by wanderlust at an early age. Marco Polo became her role model and even after she realized his explorations were prompted by commercialism and not adventure, she still longed to imitate his journey. However she became terrified that the world had become too settled to satisfy her desire for wild travel and at seventeen sent letters to every leading political figure of the time, pleading her case for a human mission to Mars. She of course planned to be in that spacecraft. 

Nowhere on earth meets her stern criteria for untouched wilderness until she stands on an Alaskan glacier in the Juneau Icefield. Going back to the trail set by Marco Polo, she discovers Fanny Bullock Workman, an early 20th Century traveler who reached the Siachen Glacier, once part of Tibet and now claimed by Kashmir. Still an unvisited piece of the world, due to the military dispute between India and Pakistan, this glacier claims Harris’s imagination. It becomes the subject of her master’s thesis and eventually sends her off on a bicycle in the company of a childhood friend, following Marco Polo along the Silk Road. Her goal is the Siachen Glacier, along a route that will take her from Turkey through the Middle East and into China, Tibet, Nepal, and India.

There’s something about bicycle travel that lends itself to travel literature. The boozy old Irishwoman Dervla Murphy wrote a whole library shelf full of books about her cycling around the undeveloped world. Andrew Pham launched his writing career with Catfish and Mandala, his emotional rediscovery of his native Vietnam on a bicycle. Barbara Savage’s Miles from Nowhere has become a travel classic, telling how she and her husband spent two years traveling around the world on their bikes. Lands of Lost Borders is different from any of its predecessors, however. Although Harris disdains Henry Thoreau, her book is much like one he would have written, had he ever pulled himself out of Concord.

Anyone who travels across countries by bicycle is an athlete. Harris takes that part of herself for granted. Instead she gives voice to her wide-ranging intellect. She’s a scientist, a historian, and a poet which makes this book a constant source of surprise. She’s a risk-taker, who happily crawls under a border fence into another country when she lacks the appropriate papers for a conventional entry. She’s also a very young woman with a tinge of bitchiness, an occasional lapse into whining, and a generous helping of humor. One of her heroes, Alexandra David Neel, would have loved her. 

“Fat grey birds scattered,,,like a toss of ball bearings…Clouds pinched the sky,” Harris says of the first moments of her journey. In Georgia, she looks at Mount Ararat and sees it as “less an upheaval of rock than a cold clump of stars.” She finds a vital link between environmental protection and trophy hunting—”Putting a price tag on wilderness can pay off.” And the farther she rides, the more she agrees with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s statement, “Nationalism is babyishness for the most part.”

Linking the Wright Brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk to bicycling over the Caucasus Mountains isn’t far-fetched. Wilbur and Orville were avid cyclists before they developed their first plane and icy slopes occasionally send Harris and her companion into short flights that end in crashes. As they cycle into spring, the theme of her journey becomes clear to Harris:”No road was long enough to learn all I wanted to know and get where I wanted to go.” She learns to be tolerant of Polo’s unadventurous pragmatism since she is “so privileged, so assiduously comfortable that risk and hardship hold rapturous appeal.” Even so, as she crosses Uzbekistan’s desert, sleeping during the day and traveling after dark, she understands why “the Uzbek language has no word for fun.”

In Tibet they meet two elderly pilgrims who are crawling down a highway to reach Lhasa, their knees and arms protected with thick cloth but their foreheads sporting a thick callus “like a third eye.” In Nepal, the Buddha becomes an omnipresent entity after the cyclists pass through Lumbini. Any mystical connection is broken when Harris sees Siddhartha emblazoned everywhere on shop signs and wonders what he would think of the Siddhartha Internet Cafe. 

She’s too much a scientist to dabble in mysticism but her observations of the natural world come close to that of the “absolute unmixed attention” that Simone Weil called prayer. And in the end, Harris concludes that her goal was never “a place to reach to reach, but a reason to go.” She now lives near the Canadian-Alaskan border, not too far from the Juneau Icefield that had first satisfied her hunger for wilderness. With any luck, someday she’ll write about that—an adventure in which she stays in one place.~Janet Brown

Earthlings by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori (Granta)

In Sayaka Murata’s previous novel, Convenience Store Woman, (Asia by the Book, March 2018) the main character feels like she doesn’t fit into society and doesn’t understand why people won’t leave her alone. Now, in Earthlings, her second book to be published in English and translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, she has taken the subject of “fitting in” to an extreme as Natsuki, the main character, does her best to be a functioning part of society. 

However, readers should be warned that this is definitely a title that should not be judged by its cover. The image of the cute stuffed doll may have one imagining that this might be a heartwarming fantasy about an alien stranded on earth, like E.T., who just wants to go home. The reader would be so far off the mark and may be disappointed to find out that Sayaka Murata’s world is not that simple. Her world is much darker and more real than any fantasy. 

As a child, Natsuki thought she was an alien. She believes that she is a wizard and has magic powers, given to her by a stuffed animal she bought with her New Year’s money when she was just six. Her special friend is called Piyyut. She’s now eleven but still believes she is a magician,  “a real one with actual magical powers.” 

Every summer, Natsuki and her family leave their home in Chiba and go visit her grandparent’s home in the fictitious town of Akishina, located high up in the mountains of the Southern Alps. Along with Piyyut, she carries an origami magic wand and a magical transformation mirror in her bag. 

Piyyut is from the Planet Popinbopopia. “The Magic Police had found out that Earth was facing a crisis and had sent him on a mission to save our planet.” By now, we can either believe that Natsuki really does have magical powers or that she just has an extremely active imagination. It’s also hard to determine if Piyyut is just a stuffed animal that doesn’t say anything or if he really is an alien, come to help save the earth.

The only one who knows her secret is her cousin Yuu who lives in Yamagata. Summer is the only time when they meet. Natsuki calls him her boyfriend. They made a pledge to each other when they were nine. Yuu shares with Natsuki his own secret, telling her that he is also an alien. 

After returning to Chiba one summer and going back to cram school, Natsuki has an experience that will affect her for the rest of her life. She is molested by her teacher, a teacher who is popular among students. She once tries to tell her mother about the incident but her mother won’t listen.

The following summer, the family is once again in Akishina. Natsuki is happy because she will see her boyfriend who is also her cousin (of course their parents and relatives don’t know about their relationship). Unfortunately for Natsuki and Yuu, they are caught having sex together the night before Natsuki’s family is to return to Chiba. 

The book then goes twenty three years into the future. Natsuki is now a housewife. However her marriage is a marriage of convenience. Her husband is desperately trying to escape society while Natsuki hopes to become a “tool for the Factory”, meaning she hopes to be able to be a “baby factory” because that’s what society expects for women. Her husband thinks otherwise. 

Natsuki’s husband convinces her to take him to Akishina since he’s heard so much about it. The family feels it might not be the best timing as Yuu is currently living in the house. After the two were caught together, both families had refused to let them see or talk to each other. It was now twenty-three years since that incident. 

Will Natsuki’s husband be in shock if he learns about their secret? Does Yuu remember the promises they made as children? And will Natsuki become a “tool for the Factory” to produce “humans connected by flesh and blood”? 

Sayaka Murata’s new world in Earthlings is not for the weak of heart. She deals with a lot of taboo subjects—incest, rape, murder, violence, cannibalism, secrets, and spins it into a story that will stay with you long after you have finished reading it. I’m still not sure if Natsuki was an alien to begin with, like she said! ~Ernie Hoyt

The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng (Riverhead Books)

At first only a small boy is able to find the islands. Ah Boon is on his father’s fishing boat when the first island appears, with its bounty of fish that will bring financial stability without effort. Elusive and mysterious, the island is gone when the next trip to it takes place, reappearing only when Ah Boon is on the boat to search for it. It turns out to be one of several islands, never before seen by the small village of fisherman who profit from this discovery. 

Money from the steady crop of fish sends Ah Boon to school, an unusual step for a child raised in a kampong, one of the many villages at the edge of the sea, surrounded by mangrove trees. There he meets Siok Mei, a spirited, smart orphan from the kampong.

Their friendship becomes a fiercely loyal one, even when politics drives a wedge between them. Siok Mei becomes a Communist activist while Ah Boon finds an opportunity to join the Gah Men, British-educated Chinese from the city who find an economic goldmine in the mangrove swamps on the coast. First lured by the air-conditioned coolness and the television set in the newly built community center that has been built in the kampong, the villagers begin to understand that a more comfortable life exists outside of what they’ve always known. When Ah Boon tells them about the apartments that will soon be built nearby, ones with electricity, plumbing, bathrooms, and refrigerators, slowly they abandon their fishing village for these newfound luxuries and the construction equipment moves in. 

Singapore, the island they live on, needs more land. To get it, the Gah Men remove the mangroves, fill in the swamp, and extend Singapore into the sea. The kampongs disappear, the fishermen who live in high-rise buildings lose their livelihood, and Communism becomes a threat to be eradicated. Ah Boon and Siok Mei are on separate and dangerous pathways but their friendship pulls them together again.

Rachel Heng juxtaposes a mythic way of life against the hard truths of history, taking her characters from 1941 into the Japanese occupation from 1942-1945 and up to Singapore’s independence from Great Britain and its short-lived merger with Malaysia. The Great Reclamation shows how Singapore stamped out kampong culture in the service of its expansion, an act that would lead to the island eventually increasing its land mass by 22%. Since 1965, Singapore has gone from 227 square miles to 277 square miles and plans to reclaim another 38 by 2030, bringing it to over 300. In the process people who have traditionally been rooted to the seacoast are now far from it, suspended in buildings that keep their feet from touching the earth.

Rachel Heng’s characters are all servants of this history, each of them representing a fragment of Singapore’s past. None of them go much beyond this and the tragedy that engulfs them seems pallid as a result. It’s the kampong that’s given vivid life with descriptions that are bound to make readers mourn its disappearance--and when the enigmatic islands become threatened, this has more resonance than what takes place between Ah Boon and Siok Mei. 

This is a fine introduction to Singapore’s modern history but as a novel it falls short. Rarely does fiction cry out for a timeline but this book definitely does.~Janet Brown

The Windfall by Diksha Basu (Crown)

What happens when a middle-class Indian family  becomes extremely wealthy overnight? That is the question Diksha Basu answers in her debut novel, The Windfall. She doesn’t specifically ask this question but she has created a situation that is plausible as it is hilarious. 

Mr. Jha and his wife live in a small complex called Mayur Pallin in East Delhi. The atmosphere of the place reminds one of the bar on the American sitcom Cheers, where everyone knows your name”. It is not a slum but a community where everyone knows everyone else’s business. The complex is filled with neighbors who like to gossip, where people still hang laundry on ropes from their balconies, and where you can hear the clatter of dishes as the neighbors prepare for dinner. 

The Jhas have lived in the complex for almost twenty-five years. He is fifty-two and his wife forty-three; their twenty-three-year-old son Rupak is studying for his MBA at a university in the U.S. He has asked his closest neighbors and friends to gather in his living room so he can make an announcement before the gossiping starts. The Jhas are “moving out, and not just moving out, but moving to Gurgaon, one of the richest new neighborhoods in Delhi.”

Mr. Jha created a website which became quite successful and he has managed to sell it for twenty million dollars. He overhears one of his neighbors saying the sale of the website and his newly acquired wealth was “a lucky windfall.” However, Mr. Jha knows that it was no “lucky windfall,” He had worked hard on the website for four years before selling it.

The Jhas are moving into a two-story bungalow with front and back yards. The house is located in a quiet area of Gurgaon, “away from the traffic and chaos of the rest of Delhi.” It’s a place “that hawkers and beggars avoided.” The houses in Gurgaon are widely spaced apart and interaction with the neighbors is minimal. “Mr. Jha knows he was supposed to want that-- that was how rich people’s tastes were supposed to be.”

Now that Mr. Jha is rich, he wants to fit in with his new neighbors. He recently bought a new car, a Mercedes, which was embarrassingly delivered to his home in Mayur Palli. After he meets his new neighbor, Mr. Chopra, he feels the need to one-up Mr. Chopra on everything, much to the chagrin of his wife.

Meanwhile, his son in America is failing his classes. He is currently on academic probation and if his grades don’t improve, he will have to return to India, a failure in his parents’ eyes. He also has a white girlfriend named Elizabeth that he knows his parents will not approve of. Elizabeth keeps pressuring Rupak to talk to his parents about them but he uses every excuse he can think of to avoid this particular conversation. 

Rupak’s parents are planning to visit him and he is at his wit’s end as he has no idea how to tell his parents that his real interest is in film, not business. He is afraid to introduce Elizabeth to them, and he’s having a crisis of his own. 

The Windfall is a satire about wealth. It’s an Indian version of “keeping up with the Joneses.” The comical antics of Mr. Jha will have you shaking your head as he thinks of different ways to let his new neighbor know that he is as good as or better than they are. At times, Mr Jha’s actions will irritate and annoy you, but you can’t help smiling as you try to picture yourself in his shoes. 

What it all comes down to is that this is a story about family and belonging. It is also about ambition and failure. Who’s to say what we will do if we unexpectedly become rich beyond our means. I must say, I wouldn’t mind finding out. ~Ernie Hoyt

Daughters of the New Year by E. M. Tran (Hanover Square Press)

Xuan “wears her American citizenship with discomfort,”  she marinates the holiday dishes of her new country in soy sauce because fish sauce is impossible to find in New Orleans, and she reads a book of Chinese horoscopes every year “like a very important yearly report.” She has to. How else can she monitor the lives of her American daughters, the Earth Goat, the Fire Tiger, and the Earth Dragon? A Metal Tiger herself, Xuan knows the importance of these annual predictions and it’s her responsibility to keep her children informed. 

Trac, the Earth Goat, has graduated from Columbia Law with the knowledge that New York shares New Orlean’s racism without realizing it. Deciding she prefers the clarity of Southern bigotry, she now practices law in her hometown while struggling with the truth that as a Vietnamese American, she’s “not we, not them.” In love with a woman who’s a white Southerner, Trac knows the only ones who can understand her position are her sisters.

Nhi, the Fire Tiger, is in the city where her mother had captured the title of Miss Saigon 1973. As a contestant in an American get-the-bachelor reality show, this girl raised in New Orleans knows Saigon is “no more home to her than Bogota or Brussels, but here she feels her ancestry. She’s surrounded by people who look like her, whose language she’s heard all her life but can barely speak, and she feels as though in Saigon she’s “both a stranger and an intimate.”

Trieu is the youngest, still living at home, the Earth Dragon who knows her sisters’ secrets and guards them from their mother. Graduating from a “magnet” school where the elementary students are all gifted and mostly white, Trieu is alien in middle school where she’s surrounded by Black and first-generation Vietnamese American kids. She’s the Twinkie, yellow on the outside, white on the inside—and as the outsider, Trieu becomes an observer whose ambition is to write. 

Just as these women begin to take shape, they dissolve into a family history, one that mirrors the history of Vietnam. Suddenly Xuan is in a boat with her mother, her sister, and thirteen other people, with jewelry and gold sewn into her clothing, imperiled by starvation, thirst, and the threat of Thai pirates. Tien, Xuan’s mother, prepares her own mother for burial and sorts through photographs of a vanished life, before their family’s grand house and their rubber plantation was destroyed by a never-ending war. And back through the centuries the story goes, revealing secrets that were never told, the heroic exploits of women whom the New Orleans sisters will never know. 

A family tree traces the existence of these women, from the legendary Trung sisters who led an ancient rebellion to rid their country of Chinese rule to Xuan’s three daughters who each rebel in their own fashion. (All on the family tree are provided with their own zodiac sign, buttressing the novel’s title.)

Anyone who has grown up American in a family based upon immigrant ancestors, which is to say all of us, will understand E. M. Tran’s attempt to recover her shrouded family history. Her novel is essentially a collection of linked short stories, with no single character developing into fullness. The wit and scathing observations that bring the first portion of her narrative to life fade into a patchwork of history, with characters who are as faded as blotched and deteriorating photographs from the past. This is a book that should have gone deeper—and should have been much longer—to give its characters the life they deserve.~Janet Brown

On the Front Line : The Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin by Marie Colvin (Harper)

I really respect and admire people who are totally dedicated to their work, especially those people who often make sacrifices of their own to help the more unfortunate. I believe that being a war correspondent is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. Journalists put their lives at risk to bring news of atrocities committed around the world. I am referring to the journalists who make an effort to go into the heart of a conflict, refusing to sit back in their comfortable hotels to report their stories secondhand from refugees, soldiers, and international aid workers. Marie Colvin was one of those people. 

Marie Colvin was an American who had been a war correspondent for the Sunday Times since 1986 when she covered the U.S. bombing of Tripoli in Libya. Since then, she reported on conflicts around the world. She covered the Iran-Iraq War, she stayed in Baghdad throughout the bombing during the first Persian Gulf War. She was also the first journalist to enter Kosovo from Albania with the Kosovo Liberation Army after the bombing by NATO planes.

She lost the sight of her left eye covering the conflict in Sri Lanka but that didn’t stop her from going back to other conflict zones after her recovery. She went back to the Middle East to report on the continuing problems facing Israeli-Arab relations, the departure of U.S. forces from Iraq and the resurgence of Al-Qaeda, on Afghanistan and the return of the Taliban fighting against Hamid Karzai’s government. She also sent dispatches from Iran, Egypt, and Libya, until she was killed in February of 2012 while covering the uprising in Syria. 

On the Front Line is a collection of her reports in the various conflicts she has covered. Several of the articles focus on the Middle East—the Iran-Iraq War, The Gulf War, Soviet Jews escaping persecution and finding refuge in Israel’s Occupied West Bank. She interviewed Yassir Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and was one of the three remaining journalists in Dili, in East Timor where the United Nations were planning to pull out leaving hundreds of East Timorese to fend for themselves against the Indonesian army and militias. However, thanks to her reporting, the U.N. reversed their decision to pull out. Colvin said, “I embarrassed the decision-makers and that felt good because it saved lives.”

Colvin’s long experience taught her that most governments lie or distort the truth to cover up what they are really doing and the only way for the world to know was for her to go in and report what she saw. The Sri Lankan government was a case in point. The northeast part of the island was controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (L.T.T.E.), a militant organization that fought to create an independent Tamil state because of the discrimination and violent persecution of them by the majority Sinhalese who dominated the Sri Lankan government. 

The ban against journalists going to the Tamil-held areas meant they could not speak with any of the leaders of the L.T.T.E. “even though the government was involved in negotiations with them through a Norwegian envoy to begin peace talks. The only news of the problems with those negotiations came from the government.”

The ban also meant that reporters had no first-hand accounts of the nearly half-million civilians living there, more than half of them being refugees. The people “were suffering under an economic embargo that the government denied existed.” Colvin was the first foreign journalist to enter the Tamil-controlled area of Sri Lanka. After she filed her story and tried to make her way back to the government-held area, she was shot in the eye, thus causing the eyepatch that became her famous trademark. 

I am fascinated and repulsed by crimes against humanity. After Colvin’s narrow escape from Sri Lanka, she was often asked if the risk was worth it. Some people called her brave while others said she must be stupid. Colvin responded to her critics and supporters alike, saying, “there’s no way to cover war properly without risk”. She didn’t care about what kinds of planes were flown, what types of tanks were used or the size of the artillery being rained down. What she wass most concerned about was “the experience of those most directly affected by the war, those asked to fight and those who are just trying to survive.” 

It amazes me as to how barbaric people can become. Colvin’s articles do not whitewash any of the facts —random killings, looting, rape, violence, torture, friendly neighbors turning on each other because they are of the wrong party or race. It appears it will take the world another millennia or more before all people realize that in war, it is the average citizen, young and old alike, who suffer the most. What the world truly needs are more people like Marie Colvin to continue writing the truth about the atrocities of war. ~Ernie Hoyt

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng (Penguin Press)

When Noah goes to the mailbox and finds a letter addressed to Bird, even though there’s no return address, he knows who it’s from. Only two people in the world still call him by his real name, Bird—his mother who vanished three years ago and his only friend, Sadie, who’s also disappeared. The handwriting on the envelope is his mother’s and so is the drawing that he finds inside--a single piece of paper covered with cats, an illustration from a story his mother used to tell him when she tucked him into bed at night.

After his mother’s departure, Bird’s father has demanded that he tell anyone who asks that she’s not a part of his life anymore. All traces of her have been destroyed and Bird’s memories of her are shadowed and incomplete. It’s Sadie who reawakens them by showing him an article she’s torn from a newspaper. His mother is Margaret Miu, a famous poet. The title of her poem, Our Missing Hearts, has become a battle cry for rebels and Miu is regarded as the leader of the rebellion.

PACT is what the rebels are fighting against—the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act. This is an integral part of America, installed after The Crisis that almost wiped out the country’s economy, a disaster for which China carries the blame. Chinese Americans are suddenly under suspicion, Bird’s mother most of all through the power of her words.

Suddenly Bird sees those words everywhere, on scraps of paper, on posters tacked up by invisible hands, in gigantic white letters painted in front of an installation of crocheted red yarn from which dolls are suspended. 

PACT, Sadie tells him before she runs away, is why she’s in a foster home. She was taken from her parents because they were part of the rebellion—and, she says, she’s only one of many children who were forcibly stripped from their families. She and the others are “the missing hearts.”

As Bird searches for a book that might hold the story that he dimly remembers, he goes to the library where a friendly librarian helps him in his quest—and remembers both Sadie and his mother. She even knows his true name and the poem that has made his mother infamous. She’s part of an underground railroad that does its best to find the missing children and reunite them with their parents. 

Suddenly Bird becomes consumed by the thought of his own quest--to find his mother and bring her home. Armed with a mysterious address that he finds by chance and the postmark on the letter he was sent, he goes off alone on a bus from Boston to New York City.

Celeste Ng has recreated the turmoil, paranoia, and inhumanity of our present century in a novel that examines this with the soft and magical touch of a fairy tale. Bird’s journey is guided by the stories his mother read to him from books by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson. From them he’s learned to trust in the guidance of strangers and to be undaunted by what appears to be matters of wild coincidence. The Duchess, the reappearance of Sadie, the bleak circumstances that govern his mother’s life are all part and parcel of the web of folktales that have informed his life.

Adult readers may find this magical construction more difficult to accept. In a world where children have been separated from their parents and may never find their way home, where Asian Hate is so prevalent that it’s featured as the cover story in magazines, and where China has become the scapegoat for many in America, one that’s responsible for everything from covid to rampant inflation, this gentle version of our reality may be offensive and infuriating.

But Ng has constructed a setting where cruelty can be combated with persistence and hope. Beneath her contemporary fairy tale setting is a call for individual action, buttressed by a sense of individual responsibility, conveyed by characters who could be real, who could be us.~Janet Brown

Dreamers of the Day by Mary Doria Russell (Doubleday)

I was shocked and appalled at my utter lack of knowledge on the history of the modern Middle East. The area has been a hotbed of controversy and conflict since ancient times. However the Middle East as we know it today was created after the end of World War I. 

Mary Doria Russell has created a novel in which a young school teacher comes into an inheritance, travels to Egypt, and meets and interacts with a number of historical figures, including Winston Churchill before he became Prime Minister, T.S. Lawrence, more commonly known as Lawrence of Arabia, and Gertrude Bell. Bob Hope makes a guest appearance as well. 

To be honest, I was familiar with Winston Churchill, only after he became Prime Minister. I had thought Lawrence of Arabia was a Hollywood creation, and I had no idea who Gertrude Bell was. But thanks to Mary Doria Russell’s meticulous research, I now know that before Churchill became Prime Minister, he was the Secretary of State for the Colonies and oversaw British foreign policy in the Middle East; that T.E. Lawrence was an actual person; and it was Gertrude Bell who was notable for helping to create the Kingdom of Iraq. 

Dreamers of the Day is narrated in the first person by Agnes Shanklin, an unmarried school teacher living in the Midwest and the eldest of three children. The time is 1918 when the “Great War and the Great Influenza fell on our placid world almost without warning.” Agnes’s family is not immune to the plague and she loses seven of her relatives, including her sister and brother-in-law, Lillian and Douglas, their two young sons, her Uncle John, her mother, and her brother Ernest. 

Lillian, Agnes’s sister, has married a professor at a college they both attended and he is offered a post to teach at the American Mission School in Jebail in Syria (which is today known as Byblos in the country of Lebanon). There she meets and becomes friends with T.S. Lawrence. In 1919 Agnes’s sister calls her and tells Agnes that she and her husband are taking her to a talk given by Sir Lawrence. It’s after this that she and her family contract the deadly virus. Agnes is the only one to survive.

After settling the affairs of three separate estates, Agnes finds herself “with plenty of money and no family of my own to support” so she books passage and takes the trip of a lifetime. She makes reservations to stay at the Semiramis Hotel in Cairo.

The year is 1921 and the Semiramis Hotel has been chosen as the site for the Cairo Peace Conference, a secret meeting held by British officials to partition the lands of the defeated Ottoman Empire that would become the nations of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan.

Into this world comes a single, middle-aged lady who finds herself in the company of celebrities and dignitaries alike. Agnes also finds romance, albeit with a married man who is a German Jew. She surmises that he is a spy because she is taken in by his charm and chivalry.

Russell’s story is as entertaining as it is educational. It teaches us the rich history of the Middle East but it also sheds light on the arrogance and condescension against natives by the core of the British bureaucracy. Russell has one of her characters state, “They believe that freedom is an object to be delivered, like a parcel that arrives in the post.” 

The rebuttal by Agnes Shanklin is priceless as she replies, “They must surely know what freedom isn’t. It isn’t having British troops all over their land. It isn’t taxation without representation,” a major point for a lesson in American history. 

Unfortunately, the Middle East is still a land full of conflict. The Palestinians have yet to be given their own nation, the Kurds are still nationless as well. It may be another millennia before anybody sees any real changes in the Middle East. We can only hope. ~Ernie Hoyt

On Java Road by Lawrence Osborne (Penguin Random House UK)

Adrian Gyle hovers perilously on the edge of the old acronym, FILTH, Failed in London, Try Hong Kong, but in his case this is reversed. Although he’s lived and worked in Hong Kong since The Handover, he’s still known only as “a writer of something or other,” a self-described “excellent nonentity.” What has kept him afloat in his adopted city--and what’s kept him from returning to London as a failure-- is a bit of luck, a friendship from his university days with the son of a Hong Kong billionaire, a frivolous but loyal comrade. 

Jimmy Tang sees himself as a kind of Pygmalion, buying his old college chum the suits that will distinguish him from other journalist hacks, taking him to Hong Kong’s best restaurants, inviting him to parties where Gyle meets “useful friends.” But Hong Kong has changed over the past decades. “The disturbances”  have erupted and the divisions they have caused are jagged ones. Students, police, and Triad thugs battle it out on the streets while families like Jimmy’s, “servants of stability,” stay aloof, worrying that the revolutionaries will “spoil their paradise.”

Gyle is emotionally detached from the battles that he witnesses until he meets Jimmy’s latest girl. Rebecca To is beautiful, articulate, 23, and a rebel. From a family so closely linked to Jimmy’s own that the two of them are committing “social incest,” she comes to dinner bearing the scent of tear gas. 

Gyle, after three meetings, becomes infatuated with his friend’s girl and when she mysteriously disappears soon after she and Jimmy have broken up, he is haunted by Rebecca. Is she one of the many bodies who have shown up in Victoria Harbor? Could Jimmy’s visit to a morgue, one where a drowned girl has recently arrived, be a sign that this dead girl might be Rebecca? And who has sent an anonymous email to Gyle with details of Rebecca’s final days and of the way she died, an email that implies that Jimmy was complicit in her death?

The real mystery of On Java Road is the book itself. Is it a thriller or a tale of the supernatural? Is it an adventure steeped in class differences and political change or just a lengthy description of Hong Kong that’s been cloaked with an overlay of fiction? 

There’s a fine line between detachment and complete disinterest that Lawrence Osborne’s novel flirts with. He gives more details about the sartorial and gustatorial habits of Hong Kong’s plutocrats than he does about the revolution that’s tearing the city apart. When conversations between his characters threaten to illuminate local politics, he removes all quotation marks and gives a brief and superficial summary of reported speech. The book is rich with Gyle’s interior thoughts and observations while every other character exists in a shadow land, amorphous and allowed only brief moments of animation.

Much praised for his sense of place, Osborne excels in his evocative portrait of Hong Kong, a city that he clearly loves. His observations of its neighborhoods are vivid enough to make readers want to get on the next plane and see this beauty for themselves. Unfortunately it also gives rise to the feeling that On Java Road is a collection of lovely pieces written for a glossy travel magazine that have been grafted onto a slender novella. Although Osborne has often been compared to Graham Greene, this work is more reminiscent of the kind of short story written by W. Somerset Maugham. Appropriately enough for the season, this is a ghost story--and the ghost of a novel that never really comes to life.~Janet Brown

Wanting Mor by Rukhsana Khan (Groundwood Books)

Rukhsana Khan is a Canadian children’s book writer who was born in Lahore, Pakistan and currently lives in Toronto, Canada. She writes mostly about Muslim culture and the Middle East.

Wanting Mor is set in post-Taliban Afghanistan. Jameela is a young girl and a devout Muslim whose mother is her inspiration. She was born with a cleft lip and because of that she didn't have many friends. Her father is originally from Kabul and is currently helping to build a new road for the rural village that they live in. 

The story opens with the death of Jameela’s Mor, the Pushto word for mother. Without her mother’s guidance, Jameela doesn’t know what will become of her life. There is no school in her war-torn village so she can not read or write. Jameela often avoided her Baba, the Pushto word for father. He had an unpredictable temper and didn’t like the way he would look at her lip, “like somehow it was my fault I was born this way.”

A few days later as Jameela is doing the laundry, her father returns from work and says to pack up everything and tells her they’re leaving. He tells her he sold all their belongings and said they were moving to Kabul. Jameela couldn’t protest and the only thing she was able to take with her was a bundle of her wet clothes and a comb. 

She does manage to say goodbye to her Mor at her gravesite. Jameela who has never left her village feels that she can hear her mother saying, “Remember the man who asked the Prophet (peace be upon him) for advice. What did the Prophet (peace be upon him) tell him?”  “Don’t become angry. Don’t become angry. Don’t become angry.”

Her father takes them to a house where Jameela is immediately put to work. She can see her father getting money from the man who owns the house. The man’s wife first tells her to clean the pots in the kitchen. They need scrubbing but Jameela who has never lived in the city has never seen soap. The dishes are done by using ash. Jameela doesn’t know what soap is, she can’t believe that you can get water inside the house and don’t need a hauling bucket. 

Jameela tries her best to please the woman of the house. She quickly learns how to use a gas stove, how to use water and soap to scrub pots. What she can’t get used to is seeing her father act the way he does - drinking alcohol, getting drunk, dancing with another man’s woman at a party. She has to keep reminding herself - “Don’t become angry. Don’t become angry. Don’t become angry.” It becomes her mantra of sorts. 

Things do not work out at the house but Jameela’s father already had a new plan in motion. He drags Jameela to another house and tells her, “Jameela, this will be your new mother”. Jameela’s new stepmother is even more demanding than the previous woman. The mother treats her like a slave and doesn’t like her. Finally, one day, Jameela’s father takes her to a busy market with him. He tells her he needs to do something, then abandons her there. 

What becomes of Jameela is tragic and yet inspiring. A kind-hearted man takes her to an orphanage where she at least has a temporary home, makes friends and learns how to read and write. She is a testament to her faith and convictions. Her Mor always remains in her heart. Mor was her mentor, her role model, her pillar of strength. Now with no mother, and no father too, Jameela must face the world on her own. Her mother always told her, “If you can’t be beautiful you should at least be good.” She takes this advice to heart and endures a countless number of hardships before an orphanage takes her in. 

The author, Rukhsana Khan says that although the story is fiction it was based on an actual incident. She read a report on children in crisis that was issued by Afghanistan’s department of orphanages. In the report, it mentioned the story of a girl named Sameela. Her mother had died during the war, her father remarried and the new stepmother didn’t want her, so the father took her to the marketplace and left her there. 

It’s so sad to hear of reports like this and at times I found it irritating how governments refer to civilian deaths as “collateral damage” but the statistics doesn’t include the hundreds, if not thousands, of children, who are left as orphans. And the actions of the father in this story is as repulsive as the true life report. When will world leaders learn, “in war, there are no winners” or as the United Nations tweeted on their official Twitter account, “There are no winners in war, but countless lives will be torn apart.” ~Ernie Hoyt

Ghost Town by Kevin Chen, translated by Darryl Sterk (Europa Editions)

Keith Chen has escaped from Yongjing, the rural village in Taiwan where he grew up, a place so small that the only privacy the inhabitants know is found in the secrets they carry. Secrets, Keith learns early in life, breed violence. “We never held you,” his dead father tells him in a ghostly confession that no human can hear, “We hit you instead.” 

In Berlin, secrets haunt the lives of Keith and T, the man who wants to marry him but is constrained to a domestic partnership by German law. Unable to answer the questions his lover asks in the one language they share, Keith writes down what T wants to know, in stories that T is unable to read. T’s own secret emerges in acts of sadism that culminate in his death. His murderer goes to prison and when Keith is finally released, he returns to his village and the four sisters who survived their childhoods. 

Ghosts are commonplace entities in Yongjing: the woman who haunts a deserted bamboo grove, Keith’s father whose death fails to remove him from his family, the most beautiful of Keith’s sisters whose lush body encloses an aridity that drives her to suicide.  But when he returns, Keith discovers his own ghostliness, moving through a changed landscape, where odors provide his only orientation and his sisters prove to be his only anchors.

Kevin Chen tells this story through the voices of the dead and the living, each one unfolding a narrative that’s brutal, steeped in sensory details that rarely make their way into fiction, relieved by surprising bursts of humor and quick flashes of beauty. Every voice rings out with its own individual timbre, carrying its own particular burden of memories. Slowly secrets come into the open, bit by bit, until the facts appear in stark truth, losing their power once they’ve been told.

Ghost Town is a shocking novel in the way it toys with its readers’ emotions, while maintaining a stoic and matter-of-fact unveiling of its details. A child striptease artist becomes an unlikely savior; a girl is punished by witnessing her grandmother kill her dog and serve it as the family dinner; a nouveau riche mansion is described in satirical detail, right down to the waterbed that’s filled with “melted snow from the Swiss alps.” In prison Keith takes comfort in knowing that he’s “small fry compared to some of the guys” with whom he’s acting in a version of Hamlet. “The guy who is playing Ophelia in drag killed three people. Another of the Hamlets killed five. I only killed one.” Then there are the sisters, each one of them a small masterpiece of sibling rivalry, coming together “like bacon in a skillet…I know where your scars are, you know where I hurt…The sisters kept turning on the heat.” And it’s doubtful that any reader will fail to be surprised by what emerges at the story’s end.

Everyone in Yongjing, ghosts and survivors, exist outside of the world at large, “in a time zone all of their own.” The dead, observing the present, often seem more alive and aware than the living, who carry the weight of the past. As Chen asks in his Afterword, “Do you become a ghost only after you die? Or can you qualify as a ghost while you are still alive?” It’s a question that taunts and haunts, one that will keep this novel alive long after its last page has been turned.~Janet Brown

Lust, Caution by Eileen Chang, translated by Julia Lovell (Anchor Books)

Eileen Chang, also known as Zhang Ailing, was born in Shanghai, China in 1920. She was studying literature at Hong Kong University, but returned to her hometown in 1941 during the Japanese Occupation. Her stories are about life in 1940’s Shanghai and were highly acclaimed by the book buying public, although she was panned by critics for not focusing more on the political climate of the times, especially after the communist takeover. She first moved to Hong Kong then found her way to the United States. 

Lust, Caution was first published in 1979 and unlike most of her stories, focuses on characters involved in the radical and patriotic movement of the times. It is set in Shanghai and Hong during the second Sino-Chinese War. Radical Cantonese students plot to assassinate Mr. Yee, the head of intelligence in Wang Ching-wei’s government, a real historical figure who formed a collaborationist government with the Japanese occupying forces in Nanking between the years of 1940 and 1944. 

At first the students plan to assassinate Mr. Yee in Hong Kong but their plans are thwarted as Mr. Yee and his family unexpectedly return to the mainland. The students are going to abandon their plans due to a lack of funds and no chance of getting close to Mr. Yee again. This is also when the female conspirators denounce Chia-chih as being a whore for having sexual relations with Liang Jun-shung, also a student conspirator who trained Chia-chih in the art of seduction. However, Mr. Wu, a member of the underground resistance against Wang Chie-wei’s government, offers to sponsor the students’ plans in Shanghai. 

Wang Chia-chih is a student actress who is assigned the role of Mai Tai-tai, he wife of a fictional Hong Kong businessman named Mr. Mai who was made bankrupt after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the fall of Hong Kong. It is Chia-chih's task to seduce Mr Yee and lead him to his final demise. After the loss of Mr. Mai’s business, Mai Tai-tai decides to do a bit of smuggling herself and takes some luxury items to sell in Shanghai where she is soon introduced to Mr. Yee’s wife. 

Chia-chih’s becomes a member of Yee Taitai’s mahjong circle and has a secret affair with Mr. Yee. On the day of Mr Yee’s assassination attempt, Chia-chih has a change of heart and tells Mr. Yee to run.

The story was also made into a feature length film in 2007 and was directed by Ang Lee, who also writes an Afterword in the book. The character of Chia-chih is believed to be based on the real-life spy named Zheng Pingru, who gathered intelligence on the Japanese Occupying forces and attempted to assassinate Ding Mocun, the security chief of the Wang Ching-wei government. 

As Lust, Caution is a novella, the story is fast-paced and some of the supporting characters are not fully developed. As soon as they are introduced, they are never heard from again. Also lacking is the backstory to Chia-chih’s affair with Liang Jun-shung. Her act of betrayal to the student conspirators leaves the reader baffled. Has she fallen in love with Mr. Yee? Does she believe that his feelings for her are genuine as well?

In the end, it is still up to the reader to decide why Chia-chih did what she did as Mr Yee escapes and the students, including Chia-chih, are all captured and put to death. After the execution, Mr Yee realizes that he did love Chia-chih but did what he thought he must do to prevent any rumors spreading, and thus it can be said of their romance, “In war, there are no winners, but all are losers”. ~Ernie Hoyt

After the Last Border by Jessica Goudeau (Viking)

The United States is peopled by the descendants of immigrants. Despite this, U.S. immigration policy has historically been ungenerous. Emma Lazurus’s poem The New Colossus, written in 1883, has always been the ideal, not the reality. “The huddled masses yearning to be free” have received a grudging welcome through “the golden door.” Jessica Goudeau vividly reveals this in After the Last Border, through the stories of two immigrant women and a concise history of America’s stance toward immigration.

A year before Lazurus wrote her classic poem, the US slammed the door on Chinese immigrants with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. A battle between restrictionists and liberalizers of immigration has been raging ever since, with racism fueling the restrictionist side. Like the president who would come long after their first appearance, restrictionists wanted “literate, upper-class, white, Northern Europeans without disabilities.” Even those criteria failed to save the 937 Jewish asylum seekers fleeing Hitler on the MS St. Louis in 1939. Refused entry into the United States, the passengers were sent back  to Europe where 254 of them died in concentration camps.

Scarred by that act of cruelty and fueled by the Cold War, U.S. immigration softened to allow entry to refugees from Communism. First the Hungarians and Cubans arrived, and after the signing of the Immigration Act of 1965 came Southeast Asians. But the policy ignored Haitian refugees and Nigerians who fled the Biafran war. Racism still lurked under the surface, limiting immigration as best as it could.

Goudeau shows the mercurial nature of U.S. immigration policy through the stories of very different women whose experiences diverge because of the rapid changes that can come to that policy without warning.

Mu Naw is the lucky one. She, her husband, and their two children arrive as refugees in Austin, Texas in 2007. Karen villagers who had fled Myanmar for the safety of a refugee camp in Thailand, Mu Naw and her family have never known security and they welcome the idea of resettlement. Young and rootless, the young parents find their new life is one where they can make a living, as sparse as entry-level positions will allow, and where their children can be educated. Mu Naw had lived in refugee camps since she was five. In spite of the challenges and hardships that come her way in Texas, she proves to be more adaptable than her husband and eventually more successful. When they buy a house in 2016, her husband admits this achievement is because of her efforts.

Hasna is less fortunate. In her midyears, she too comes to Austin, nine years after Mu Naw, with her teenage daughter and a husband who has been so badly injured that he’ll never work again. War in Syria disrupted her life as an affluent, educated, proud matriarch, sending her across the border into Jordan. When she’s advised to apply for refugee status, she turns it down--until she learns that family resettlement is a key provision in immigration policy. Her husband’s objections to this plan are silenced by an explosion that tears his body apart and her adult children are scattered across different countries. The thought that they could all be together again, along with the promise of medical care for her husband, propels Hasna into the bureaucratic thicket of paperwork and interviews that will take them away from war to a family home in another country. She arrives four months before Donald Trump is elected president. Two months later, his ban against Muslim immigrants and his dismantling of the family resettlement policy turns Hasna’s dreams into a waking nightmare.

Jessica Goudeau’s skillful and intimate journalism gives the narratives of Mu Naw and Hasna the pace and detail of a novel, interspersing them with chapters that illuminate the policies that have shaped these women’s lives. What could easily have been a polemic is instead a quiet and heart wrenching history that is too little known by most of us and should be read by all.~Janet Brown

A Beautiful Lie by Irfan Master (Albert Whitman & Co.)

Irfan Master lives in London but has set A Beautiful Life in Gujarat, India where his family comes from. It is his debut novel. The story centers around the Partition of India. To understand the story, we need to understand this division of British India into independent nations—Hindu-dominated India, Muslim-dominated Pakistan, and East Pakistan which later became Bangladesh. Once the British left and the two nations were left on their own, it spawned one of the greatest migrations of people in history. There was also an outbreak of sectarian violence between Hindus and Sikhs on one side fighting against Muslims on the other and an estimated 200,000 to 2,000,000 people were killed. 

The year is 1947, approximately three months before Partition. Thirteen-year old Bilal is a young Muslim boy taking care of his father who is lying on his deathbed. Bilal’s mother has already passed away and his older brother is hardly ever at home. Bilal senses that there is something wrong with the neighborhood he grew up in. He can’t put his finger on it yet but he feels the tension in the air and recognizes the changes in the market. Two stallholders used to be partners, one making daal while the other made rice. Now, they each have their own stalls selling the same item.

Bilal opens the story by making a confession as an adult. “Everybody lies. We all do it. Sometimes we lie because it makes us feel better and sometimes we lie because it makes others feel better.” 

What was the lie that Bilal told? It was something he felt he should not let his Bapuji (father) know as he felt the truth would send his bapuji to his death early. Bapuji is not only Bilal’s father, he is also his guide and mentor. He is a well-educated man and well aware of his condition. He tells his son that he would need to make arrangements to live with his sister in Jaipur. 

Although Bilal agrees with what his bapuji says, he has no intention of moving or leaving his bapuji to die alone. Bapuji is always asking Bilal for news, especially on the issue of the government reaching a decision to divide the country. He tells his son, “the soul of India can’t be decided by a few men gathered around a map clucking like chickens about who deserves the largest pile of feed.”

The only thing Bilal wants is for his father to die in peace. So, with the help of his friends, Chota, Manjeet, and Saleem, they scheme to keep the news of India’s impending Partition a secret. They also devise ways to intercept potential visitors to Bapuji, even his own doctor. But how long can they keep this a secret? And will Bapuji die knowing his India is still one and the same?

I found the story to be very reminiscent of the 2003 German film Good-bye Lenin! which has a similar plot. In the movie, the story follows a family in East Germany. The mother is a dedicated socialist but falls into a coma in October of 1989 before the November Revolution. She awakes eight months later in June of 1990 not knowing about the fall of the Berlin Wall or that East Germany has reunited with West Germany to become the nation of Germany. Her son tries to protect her from the truth as he believes it may kill her. 

A Beautiful Life is about filial duty and having the courage to face inevitable changes…in life, in the environment where you live. It is about trying to understand the hatred between people just because they follow a different religion. The death and violence caused by the Partition of India may have been avoided if the British who were leaving didn’t just arbitrarily assign a line dividing the nation in two. A Beautiful Life is a beautiful and poignant story and although written for a younger generation, the ending will stick with you long after you have finished reading the book. ~Ernie Hoyt