Although Half Light takes place on the cusp of India’s 2018 decriminalisation of homosexuality, Mahesh Rao uses this historic transition not as a centrepiece but as a lens to investigate the quieter dramas and private reckonings of those in the shadows of moments of social transformation.
Category Archive: Fiction
The Sun family seems to have everything—a multi-squillion dollar empire, homes and compounds in prime California real estate and no shortage of power, influence, notoriety and fame. But the one thing access to the Sun family trust requires is the one thing the family doesn’t have: a male heir. But some members of the Sun clan have plans to change this and soon there is a race to see which grandchild can first produce a male heir.
Yoko Tawada’s Archipelago of the Sun, translated by Margaret Mitsutani, is the third and final instalment of a trilogy. The first two volumes—Scattered All Over the Earth and Suggested in the Stars—introduce a diverse cast of characters centered around Hiruko, a Japanese woman in search of her homeland, which seems to have vanished from the earth and almost from memory. Along the way she befriends a Danish linguist, a transgender Indian, a German museum worker, an Eskimo sushi chef, and a seemingly ageless Japanese cook. This motley group accompanies Hiruko in her search, which takes place across a near-future European landscape in which contemporary ecological and political issues have intensified. Europe is a tranquil welfare state while America has become the world’s largest manufacturing base. The climate has been horrendously damaged, causing the collapse of many ecosystems and the cultures they support. Immigration has become a necessity for many, even while some borders have calcified, and geopolitical tensions abound. And, of course, there is the looming question of what happened to Japan. (Did it sink beneath the sea? Enter political isolation? Or was it simply forgotten?)
Chetan Bhagat occupies a distinct and highly influential space in contemporary Indian letters in English. While his previous work 11 Rules for Life nudged Bhagat into self-help, 12 Years reverts to his signature formula—romantic disillusionment as middle-class catharsis. His phenomenal commercial success from his 2005 debut novel Five Point Someone to this latest, eleventh work of fiction rests on a well-honed formula that fuses relatable urban narratives, lucid prose, and themes reflecting contemporary Indian life: aspirations, romance, career anxieties, and societal pressures.
A Swiss-Italian-Spanish author fluent in six languages (including English), Vanessa Fabiano first traveled to China more than thirty years ago and resided in Shanghai and Beijing around the time of SARS in the early 2000s. Her new collection of related stories, Chinese on the Beach, makes use of this timeframe, a period of growing friendships between Chinese and foreigners.
Author and activist Sarah Joseph was born and raised in present-day Kerala, known for both Jewish and Christian populations dating back well into the first millennium CE. A Christian herself, she writes both poetry and prose in Malayalam, often centering around religion and feminism. A decade ago she won accolades for a novel based on the Ramayana. Now she has a new novel, Stain, translated by Sangeetha Sreenivasan, that re-imagines the biblical story of Lot, largely set in the town of Sodom. Although readers of the English translation will undoubtedly be familiar with the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, one would have to assume that Joseph’s original Malayalam audience either also know the story or find resonance in a biblical story set long ago and far away.
Think of Cold War communist insurgency and guerilla warfare might well spring to mind. Sometimes it worked, building from the hinterlands to capture the capital: see Cuba. Sometimes it failed: see Che in Bolivia. And sometimes the revolutionaries remained stuck in the wild, undefeated but unable to seize the state.
Malay folklore is peopled—if that’s the right word—with a variety of supernatural beings, ghosts, and spirits, which reflect cultural anxieties, historical beliefs, and the blending of animistic traditions with Islamic, Indian and Chinese influences. Given this tradition has been a fundamental part of local storytelling for centuries, it’s unsurprising that horror is a staple of the Malaysian film and publishing industries. Malay-language horror movies often outperform Hollywood blockbusters in the domestic market, and locally published horror fiction is popular, in both English, and Malay.
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.
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.
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