Ukrainian-born nurse Kateryna Ivanonva Desnytska became a Thai princess at the turn of the 20th century as wife of the Siamese prince Chakrabongse Bhuvanath. This story, with echoes of that of King Chulalongkorn and his English tutor Anna Leonowens (immortalized in The King and I) , has obvious potential for artistic adaptation: it was made into a ballet in 2003. A few years earlier, it provided the basis for a historical novel by V Vinicchayakul, the pen name of Vinita Diteeyont, a prolific Thai novelist. In her version, A Passage to Siam: A Story of Forbidden Love, only recently translated into English by Lucy Srisupshapreeda, Kateryna becomes the young Englishwoman Catherine Burnett.
Author: Susan Blumberg-Kason
Karissa Chen’s debut novel, Homeseeking, a sweeping family saga set across eight decades, is informed in part by her grandfather’s story. In her author’s note, she writes that she became interested in Chinese exiles in Taiwan a couple decades ago, just after her grandfather’s death. One of the images from her grandfather’s belongings was a photo of her grandfather crying before his mother’s grave in Shanghai. He was especially distraught because he hadn’t seen his mother since he left China just before the Communist victory in 1949 and was unable to return more than half a century later, after his mother passed away.
Debut author Kim Jiyun majored in creative writing at university, later studied television screenwriting, and found inspiration for her first novel in an unlikely place: a neighborhood laundromat. It’s paid off. Yeonnam-Dong’s Smiley Laundromat has become a bestseller in Korea and now it’s been translated into English by Shanna Tan, a prolific translator based in Singapore who works in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
Novels set around the Jewish Bene Israel community in India are as rare as hen’s teeth, but Sheela Rohekar’s 2013 Hindi novel, Miss Samuel: A Jewish-Indian Saga, translated this year into English by Madhu Singh, must be one-of-a-kind. Rohekar is perhaps the only Jewish author in India who writes in Hindi. Her novel reads as two stories in one: the fictional saga of six generations of a Bene Israel family from Amdavad, the Gujarati name for Ahmedabad, and a more general history of the Bene Israel, the earliest group of Jews to settle in India some 2000 years ago, thought (by some) to be a lost tribe of Israel.
The Soyo Workshop is a pottery studio outside of Seoul that takes its name from the words for wedging clay and firing clay in a kiln. Yeon Somin has set her second novel, The Healing Season of Pottery, in the Soyo Workshop and the quaint neighborhood where it’s situated. Similar in structure and tone to Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop and other comfort novels, the familiar coffee and cats are placed with a pottery studio that is new and different.
Tara Isabel Zambrano has published widely in literary journals, mainly stories that center around mothering in one fashion or another, usually set in India or with Indian characters in the diaspora. Now she’s compiled these stories and more in Ruined a Little When We Are Born, which continues with the theme of mothering.
Bunkong Tuon’s debut novel Koan Khmer is a coming of age story of a young Cambodian immigrant, Samnong Sok, who ultimately finds himself on a writer’s journey, not unlike the author himself.
Now available in an English translation by Jesse Kirkwood, Sanaka Hiiragi’s The Lantern of Lost Memories, a story set in a photography studio that belongs in a space between the world of the living and the afterworld, is the most recent example of Japanese “comfort fiction”.
Bernie Wong was born in Hong Kong in 1943, but her story begins in South America. Her mother, Virginia Chia, was born and raised in Huacho, Peru, to a father named Carlos Chia, who had come from China to run a shipping business in South America, and a mother named Cristina Salinas who was half-Chinese and half-Basque and relished her role as a socialite more than that of a mother. Virginia’s parents split up while she was still a young girl, after Cristina discovered that Carlos had another wife and family back in China. Cristina kicked him out and had their marriage annulled.
The island of Sri Lanka resembles a teardrop, also the title of Sue Amos’s latest novel, set in 1953 when the country was still called Ceylon. Teardrop is a murder mystery that weaves in both folklore and the beauty of the island.
You must be logged in to post a comment.