It’s been nearly 20 years since Kiran Desai won the Booker Prize with The Inheritance of Loss. Now she finally returns with an epic tale of love, race, migration, art and mysticism which thoroughly deserves its short-listing for this year’s award.
Category Archive: Fiction
Regardless of culture, mother-daughter relationships can be fraught and tensions incomprehensibly continue to be passed down generation after generation. Gish Jen addresses her own contentious relationship with her mother in her new novel, Bad Bad Girl, her tenth book and the first she’s devoted to her mother.
Written in the cursive-like Nastaliq script, and in an adaptation of Perso-Arabic alphabet, Urdu has become caught in religious silos. It “looks” Islamic, and therefore, in popular imagination, belongs to just one community in the multilingual universe. Anthologies of Urdu literature—in Urdu and in translation, especially in English—seem to have perpetuated this simplistic narrative of Urdu equals Islam by only Muslim authors in their collections. With the anthology Whose Urdu Is It Anyway?, Rakhshanda Jalil attempts to bring diversity to the scene by including only non-Muslim writers.
Qing Yuan works in a morgue, cleaning bodies. He grew up in a cultured family before 1949, studying art and literature in university. Qing Yuan’s father owned a jewelry shop and got into trouble with the new government after he tried to hide a small amount of gold during the early days of nationalization. Qing Yuan was punished for his father’s capitalist ways and when Ruyan Meng’s novel opens in 1966, he’s been the morgue keeper of the title for sixteen years.
Ann YK Choi made a splash on the literary scene a decade ago with her debut novel, Kay’s Lucky Coin Variety, a coming of age story of a young Korean-Canadian who grew up in her family’s convenience store in 1980s Toronto. This book was a finalist for the Toronto Book Awards, among many accolades. With her new novel, All Things Under the Moon, Choi effortlessly switches genres from contemporary to historical fiction.
There’s something about old Hong Kong and Shanghai that lend themselves to ghost stories and mysteries. They share a similar history during World War II as well as traditions like the Tomb Sweeping and Hungry Ghost Festivals that honour the dead. The two cities are also known for stately old colonial homes, many of which still remain today. After Kristen Loesch lived in Hong Kong 15-20 years ago, she learned of Dragon Lodge, an abandoned old home on the Peak rumored to be haunted, and formed the story that would become her new novel, The Hong Kong Widow, an engaging ghost story that alternates between wartime Shanghai, 1950s Hong Kong, and present-day US and Hong Kong. To add an extra touch to this chilling story, Hong Kong artist Jiksun Cheung’s illustrations are scattered throughout the story.
From a general historical perspective, the current confrontation between mainland China and Taiwan is not difficult to explain. By the end of the 19th century, Qing Dynasty was teetering on the brink of collapse. Territories were carved out and handed over to foreign colonizers after failed battles. Taiwan was ceded to the Empire of Japan in 1895.
Through the meddling of her older sister, Janavi, a young woman from Varanasi, India, a city on the Ganges, stumbles into an arranged marriage with Sagar. Sagar is a hydraulic engineer about to emigrate to Custer County, Montana (the “Indian Country” of the title of Shobha Rao’s new novel); he has been hired to remove a dam on the Cotton River.
Just around the founding of Israel, hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern Jews were forced out or pressured to leave their countries of birth; one of these was Yemen. These Mizrahi Jews have traditionally been treated as second-class citizens in Israel.
While Taiwan continues to be in the news due to its geopolitical ambiguities, a lesser-known aspect of its short recorded history is the establishment of a Dutch colony in its southern part in the 17th century. A Tale of Three Tribes in Dutch Formosa describes this Dutch settlement and its interactions with local indigenous people and its heroic but futile resistance against invading Chinese loyalist warlord Koxinga.
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