Brahm Saxena summons his family—his wife, daughter and son—to announce that they, especially the children, should not expect anything from him as inheritance. Rohit, the son, is rattled but Tara, the daughter, is financially independent and doesn’t bother about what she doesn’t feel entitled to.
Category Archive: Fiction
Tae Kudo is a neurotic 46-year-old woman who has become something of a hypochondriac in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic. Some of her experiences will be deeply familiar to most readers—like her caution about masking or disinfecting her groceries. Others, like her hyperfixation on conscious capitalism, the environmental impact of her actions, or even refusing to be in the same room as a houseguest, may not.
Zhang Guixing’s Elephant Herd is as complicated and teeming as the rain forest in which it is set. Within this rich natural environment is a family drama, a political drama, and what amounts to a coming-of-age novel in an incredibly violent, and seemingly amoral, world.
Mud, blood, farts and plenty of swearing: esteemed author Jia Pingwa minutely details the brutal reality of peasant life in this magnum opus set during the Cultural Revolution.
The American expat-in-Asia novel has been done so many times it’s practically its own genre, but the inverse is almost unheard of—until now. Naomi Xu Elegant’s debut novel, Gingko Season, is a witty, humorous and clever story of twenty-five-year-old Penelope Lin, an expat from Beijing who navigates adulthood alongside a diverse cast of friends.
It’s customary to begin writing on North Korea by acknowledging how difficult it is to get reliable information from such a secretive and tightly-controlled regime in such a highly politicized context. Though an undoubtedly repressive regime, in an information vacuum misinformation can spread, such as the easily-disproved but persistent misconception that all North Korean citizens must sport the same distinctive hairstyle as their leader Kim Jong-un.
The ghosts of those wronged in war invariably call out for vengeance. When the conflict is a civil war, all the more so. Families may be split apart, feuds started, and children called upon to settle scores they weren’t alive to start. The civil war that swept through China from 1927 to 1949 is no exception, and the continued tension between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland is the legacy of that conflict. In his novel Ryu—translated into English by Alison Watts—Akira Higashiyama explores the history of the Chinese Civil War and the conflicts it engenders generations later. Although originally written in Japanese, Ryu (a transliteration of the novel’s Japanese title) is a thoroughly Taiwanese novel that takes readers on an exciting odyssey through life in Taipei in the 1970s.
Kōhaku, the annual singing competition between the red and white teams, is a popular New Year’s event in Japan. In One Hundred Flowers, mother and son gather to celebrate the holiday at home by watching the program and eating dinner—a poignant reminder of how their relationship has changed over time. As a single mother, Yuriko was solely responsible for her son’s upbringing, but as the only child, Izumi increasingly finds himself taking care of his mother now as her memory begins to deteriorate.
Initially evoking the sterile chill of a dystopian sci-fi tale, with horse-riding jockey robots and humans replaced by automation, Cheon Seonran’s A Thousand Blues quickly reveals itself as something far richer: a thoughtful exploration of humanity’s uneasy coexistence with technology, as well as the contradictions of a society that both creates and undermines its own systems of care.
In Sanjena Sathian’s new novel, Goddess Complex, women’s bodies are reduced to the idea of their divine if not interchangeable—wombs. The protagonist, Sanjana Satyananda (the stark similarity in names between the author and her character is no coincidence) is a thirty-something burnt-out academic who feels intense alienation toward motherhood. She spends the course of the novel hopping from America to India, trying to stabilise her increasingly volatile sense of self in a world that prizes her fertility and criticises her choices.
You must be logged in to post a comment.