Friendships that begin in early childhood and endure through adulthood differ from friendships started in later years. In her debut novel, Fiona and Jane, Jean Chen Ho explores the special bond between friends who meet in primary school and experience the ups and downs of adolescence along with the typical milestones of adulthood.
It is somewhat inexplicable that it has taken more than 35 years for Liu Xinwu’s The Wedding Party to show up in English. The book was serialized in 1984 and published the next year, winning the Mao Dun Prize and adapted into an 8-episode series for television. Popularity can be the result of hitting a…
Contrary to what may be implied by the term “contemporary Indian literature”, India is not a geographic or political monolith. Rather, India is a composite of very strong regional identities cultivated by and among its provinces. Indian fiction is only now increasingly exploring these regional stories that have somewhat been eclipsed by the larger grand…
Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s mother became separated from her sister back in 1950 and has not seen her since. Her mother is one of more than 130,000 people who have applied through the Red Cross to locate a missing sibling, child, or spouse left behind in North Korea. Stories of these separations are the subjects of…
The Indian epic Mahabharata is a complicated story of two sets of cousins, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, fighting over property. The five Pandavas, the sons of King Pandu, want their share of the kingdom but the Kauravas, the sons of Dhritarashtra, don’t want to share anything of the kingdom they see as entirely their…
Graphic novels are taken more seriously in Europe than in the English-speaking world, and so it is perhaps not surprising that The King of Bangkok, a socio-political-historical narrative based on ten years of ethnographic research by anthropologist Claudio Sopranzetti, first appeared in Italian. Although a “novel” in the sense it’s fictionalized, the elements (say the…
It’s a rare collection of short stories works as well as Reshma Ruia’s Mrs Pinto Drives to Happiness: each of her stories is captivating without any that seem weaker than the others. The characters come from a variety of countries and continents, although most are of Indian descent. The overarching theme in these stories is…
Although there is a huge amount of fiction covering the Indian diaspora, it is more usually set in Western countries, including Australia, than in Malaya, as it was, and Singapore. In Kopi, Puffs & Dreams, a finalist for the Epigram Books Fiction Prize, Pallavi Gopinath Aney explores the experience of Indian immigrants to Singapore in…
Cat and her friends are in Japan for a long weekend thanks to their high school friend, Phillip. Talia and Faiz, two of the friends, are engaged and want to relive their teenage stunts of visiting haunted houses in Kuala Lumpur. Phillip flies them, along with their friend, Lin, first class tickets from different parts…
Belonging—either to another person, a family or a nation—is the key theme of this exquisite coming-of-age novel from British-Asian writer Selma Carvalho. Carvalho has published three non-fiction books which document the Goan migration to colonial East Africa. Her intimate understanding of the diasporic experience shines through every page as she explores her characters’ search for…
“I’m going to tell you the truth,” begins the narrator on the first page of Kim Thúy’s latest, Em, “but only partially, incompletely, more or less.” To put an even finer emphasis on the point, she tells us a couple pages later, that “truth “is fragmented”—as indeed it must be when dealing with a topic…
Qaraar Ali is a young craftsman in love with the beautiful Abeerah, cherished daughter of a General in the Mughal army. A wanderer, he seeks the company of poets and spends his time visiting the shrines of 18th century Delhi. Trouble is brewing as Persia’s Nadir Shah is gathering a large army and heading towards…
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the courageous Soviet dissident and Nobel Prize-winning author of the Gulag Archipelago who died in 2008, considered The Red Wheel his most important work. Its ten volumes cover Russia from pre-World War I days to the fall of the Romanov dynasty and the early months of the 1917 Russian Revolution. The Red Wheel…
Neither the “Indian abroad” nor the “gaijin in Japan” novel are particularly rare, but by making an intra-Asian combination of these two, Sarayu Srivatsa has, with her latest novel That Was, turned these two sub-genres on their head.
The word ganbaru is ubiquitous in Japanese culture. Roughly translated, it means “persistence”, “tenacity” or “hard work”. When junior high students cram for high school entrance exams, their parents remind them, “Ganbatte!” When a 1995 earthquake killed 6,500 people and irreparably damaged more than 400,000 buildings in Kobe, the government urged people on: “Ganbaro!”