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All World Fiction Coverage

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

As the days become shorter, there’s nothing more comforting than immersing myself in a sweeping historical novel—the bigger, the better! When my book club recently voted to read Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow (Penguin, $18, 9780143110439), I welcomed the opportunity to escape nightly into the grand halls of the Metropol hotel where aristocrat Count Alexander Rostov, deemed a threat by the Bolsheviks in 1922, is sentenced to lifelong house arrest. Hotel employees, guests and other visitors round out the vibrant cast of characters in the Count’s orbit as he adjusts to his new circumstances and tries to pursue a meaningful life in confinement. His friendship with precocious 9-year-old Nina is particularly endearing; the pair’s quest to explore every nook and cranny of the hotel is a delight. All the while, outside the Count’s window, political turmoil and inevitable social change are transforming Russian society. Written with wit and warmth, Towles’ tale is one you’ll want to curl up with and return to night after night.

—Katherine, Subscriptions 


The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

I spent a few sublime weeks last winter in the company of Umberto Eco’s magisterial debut novel, The Name of the Rose (HarperVia, $19.99, 9780063279636). This medieval whodunit is intellectually absorbing and slyly hilarious as it tracks Brother William of Baskerville and Brother Adso of Melk’s quest to solve a spree of bizarre murders at a monastery in Italy. A historian, philosopher and literary theorist, Eco transports readers into the 14th-century mind, and while things get heady (at one point, Adso contemplates a door for more than a page), Eco never lets his own erudition run away with him. There are impressively gruesome deaths to describe, tangled little dramas of monastery life to tease out and one of the most unforgettable libraries in literature to explore. I read long into the night, wrapped in blankets with a mug of tea at hand, happily looking up Latin phrases and medieval heretics until arriving at Eco’s grand finale, a satisfying conclusion with a few icy notes of existential dread to balance things out.

—Savanna, Managing Editor


The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide

To me, coziness is a cat dozing on my lap, but a book that captures the magic of our purring friends will also do. A sublime, delicate meditation on the passage of time within everyday life, Takashi Hiraide’s The Guest Cat (New Directions, $14.95, 9780811221504) washes over you like a dream, making it an ideal read for a long winter night. A male narrator and his wife fall in love with their neighbor’s cat, naming her Chibi as she begins visiting them at their rented house. The wife tells the man how a philosopher once said that “observation is at its core an expression of love,” and indeed, Hiraide’s ruminations on the quotidian—dragonflies flying towards water sprayed from a garden hose, Chibi climbing a tree—carry tremendous emotion despite the unembellished prose. With equal parts joy and melancholy, the couple’s relationships with the cat and each other shift, along with the course of their lives and Japan, as the late ’80s economic bubble bursts. Hiraide slips in and out of reflection and memory with precise, feline grace.

—Yi, Associate Editor


The New Life by Tom Crewe

There is something so pleasurable about spending a chilly day absorbed in the concerns of another time and identifying resonances with our own. Tom Crewe’s debut novel, The New Life (Scribner, $18, 9781668000847), provides just such a pleasure, placing vivid characters and thorny moral dilemmas against a finely textured historical backdrop. Based on two real life freethinkers in late Victorian Britain, Crewe’s John Addington and Henry Ellis are documenting the lives of gay men for a book that they hope will shift cultural perceptions of homosexuality. It’s risky, but they believe in the cause—and that their status as married men will protect them. However, ideological differences emerge, and Addington begins to wonder if ideals can be legitimate if they are not lived openly. Crewe excels when depicting the nuances of conflict and the question of balancing personal risk against the ability to effect change, drawing readers in with polished old-fashioned storytelling that also speaks to a modern sensibility—A.S. Byatt meets Alan Hollinghurst.

—Trisha, Publisher

Ready the fireplace, put the kettle on and get out some thick woolen socks. These four titles are worthy companions for long winter nights.
Behind the Book by

I’ve been lucky enough to do a lot of traveling. A time existed, after I graduated from college, when I taught English in Japan and then backpacked around Asia. I had little money and tended to stay in rooms that cost a few dollars a night. With nothing more than a couple sets of t-shirts and shorts in my backpack, I visited places such as Vietnam, Thailand, Nepal, India, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Korea. Some of these countries I grew to know quite well. I’d find a cheap room, rent a scooter, and explore as much of an area as possible. Sometimes my future wife or my friends were with me, though I was often alone.

I saw so many beautiful things throughout these adventures, sights such as the Taj Mahal, the Himalayan peaks, and white-sand beaches unspoiled by humanity’s touch. But I think that I witnessed the most beauty within the street children I encountered. These children seemed so similar, country to country. They were out at all times of day and night, selling their postcards, their fans, their flowers. For many nights in Thailand, I played Connect Four with a boy who wasn’t older than seven or eight. We bet a dollar each game. Some travelers told me not to play with him, convinced that his parents were nearby and were sending him out at night to work. But I never saw his parents, and one night I spied him sleeping on a sidewalk, a piece of cardboard his bed. I don’t think I ever beat him in a game.

Throughout these travels I met hundreds, if not thousands, of children who lived on the street. Sometimes they were sick or had a physical deformity. But most of them were simply homeless—abandoned into extreme poverty. Bright, eager, and unafraid to laugh with a stranger, they taught me so much. I owe them so much.

My encounters with street children inspired my new novel, Dragon House. Set in modern-day Vietnam, Dragon House tells the tale of Iris and Noah—two Americans who, as a way of healing their own painful pasts, open a center to house and educate Vietnamese street children.

I’m quite excited about Dragon House. David Oliver Relin, who lived in Vietnam, and is the best-selling author of Three Cups of Tea, let me know that he thought it was “a sprawling, vibrant novel.” Robert Olen Butler, who fought in the Vietnam War, and won a Pulitzer Prize for his collection of short stories about Vietnamese Americans, told me that Dragon House is “a strong, important work from a gifted writer.” Such feedback from two wonderful writers, and two people who spent a significant amount of time in Vietnam, means a great deal to me.

It is my hope that Dragon House will be a success, and out of that success something good can happen. I plan on donating some of the funds generated from my book to an organization called Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation. This group works with children in crisis throughout Vietnam. Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation offers disadvantaged children a wide range of services and support to help them break out of poverty, forever, by getting them back to school and helping them achieve their best. If you would like more information on Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation, and what I am doing to help, please visit my website.

I appreciate the support of everyone who reads Dragon House, because the success of my novel will allow me to help street children in Vietnam, and to raise the level of awareness of the perils that street children face around the world.

My very best wishes to you.
John Shors

 

I’ve been lucky enough to do a lot of traveling. A time existed, after I graduated from college, when I taught English in Japan and then backpacked around Asia. I had little money and tended to stay in rooms that cost a few dollars a night. With nothing more than a couple sets of t-shirts […]
Behind the Book by

A single act of defiance from a daughter. An impulsive decision from a father, made in a burst of anger. A life changed forever. 

“There’s a scene in your story that’s unrealistic. The one where your main character’s marriage was arranged so quickly. In those days, matchmaking could take years, especially between old, wealthy families.”

This was the feedback from a family friend who read the manuscript for Three Souls during its early stages of editing. This friend grew up in a very traditional family and had majored in Chinese literature. If my novel’s depiction of Chinese family life in the years before World War II passed her critical judgement, I could breathe a sigh of relief.

Grandmother was married under such unusual circumstances that the story of her betrothal made its way into family legend—and into my novel.

However, the scene she had flagged as unrealistic was actually based on a true event. It is in fact almost a word-for-word retelling of how my grandmother became a bride. Grandmother was married under such unusual circumstances that the story of her betrothal made its way into family legend—and into my novel.

Grandmother was born into a wealthy, progressive, and well-educated family. At the turn of the century, when the Qing Dynasty was drawing its last gasps, the Qu clan began sending their sons to university in Japan and Europe, and their daughters to private girls’ schools in China. Grandmother possessed a keen mind, worked hard for her grades, and cherished a modest ambition to teach school one day. Her father, however, would not allow his clever daughter a career. It was not for lack of money or because the right sort of schools were not available; there were some very well-respected women’s universities in China she could’ve attended. Women of their family, he declared, did not work.

Determined to take control of her destiny even if it meant disobeying her father, Grandmother found a surprising ally when she confided in her own grandmother. The old woman gave her money for tuition and a train ticket. But in such a large household, secrets were impossible to hide. Grandmother made her escape but only got as far as the railway station before she was caught and dragged home. She had openly defied her father’s authority during a time when the family patriarch’s word was law.

Her punishment came a week later.

In a fit of anger, her father had arranged her marriage to the son of a man he had just met on a business trip. The wedding, which followed almost immediately, sealed her fate. She moved to the small town where her husband and his family lived, far away from her beloved sisters and the cultured sophistication of the Qu estate. It must have felt like live burial.

The Qu family was considered modern because their sons were educated to Western standards. But then as now, Western values were adopted unevenly, selectively and not at the same pace—especially for women. Thus Grandmother knew there was more to life than the closed-in world of courtyards, but she had to remain within that world. She may have seethed at this injustice, or perhaps her spirit was broken after the failure of her one rebellious act. Whatever her feelings, once she was married, Grandmother quietly slipped into the role she had been raised to perform: of dutiful wife, daughter-in-law and mother.  

When I began writing Three Souls, I knew it had to include this unwanted marriage and the circumstances leading up to it. The story refused to take shape until the day an image came to me: a young woman’s ghost perched in the roof beams of a small temple, looking down at her own funeral. I knew immediately this had to be the opening of the novel.

I also knew the ghost had to be the novel’s narrator because my grandmother’s sad story has haunted me since the day I first heard it. Furthermore, it felt right to make the protagonist a ghost who could not be seen or heard, unable to impact events in the real world. She was like all those generations of Chinese women who’d had to act behind the scenes, working indirectly to influence outcomes, nudging circumstances through undetected means to achieve their goals.

In life, my grandmother had no champions. With Three Souls, I wanted to give her some small token of recognition to acknowledge her talent and the difference she might have made, if not for an impulsive decision made in anger by an all-powerful parent.  

Canadian author Janie Chang was born in Taiwan and grew up in the Philippines, Iran and Thailand. She now lives in Vancouver with her husband. Three Souls, her debut novel, was based on her grandmother's life in 1930s China. Find out more on her website.

“There’s a scene in your story that’s unrealistic. The one where your main character’s marriage was arranged so quickly. In those days, matchmaking could take years, especially between old, wealthy families.”

This was the feedback from a family friend who read the manuscript for Three Souls during its early stages of editing. This friend grew up in a very traditional family and had majored in Chinese literature. If my novel’s depiction of Chinese family life in the years before World War II passed her critical judgement, I could breathe a sigh of relief.

Behind the Book by

Born in America to Afghani parents, author Nadia Hashimi grew up hearing her parents’ stories of the thriving Afghanistan they left in the 1970s. But when she finally visited decades later, she found a struggling country that bore little resemblance to their memories—especially in the way women were treated. Because of the increasing restrictions on female freedom, the custom of  bacha posh, the practice of dressing a daughter as a son, has become common. Hashimi’s first novel, The Pearl That Broke Its Shell, traces that modern tradition back to its possible origin, a time when women dressed as men to guard the king’s harem. Here, the author explains how these two cultural flashpoints inspired her debut.


Nadia HashimiIn 2002, I took my first trip to Kabul, Afghanistan. I was accompanied by my parents, who had left the country in the early 1970s, a peaceful and progressive time in the nation’s tumultuous history. We reunited with family, explored conditions of local hospitals and searched through piles of rubble where a family home once stood. It was a bittersweet experience for us all, especially my parents, who often felt foreign in their own homeland. This was not the country they had left behind. The decades of war in Afghanistan set the nation back in a devastating way. My mother and her sisters all attended college and worked alongside men in the airline industry, international organizations and engineering companies. From what we have seen on the news in the last few years, it is hard to imagine such an Afghanistan ever existed.

I was raised in a family that valued education above everything else. As a woman, it’s painful for me to hear that girls were barred from attending school under the Taliban regime. It’s heartbreaking to hear that girls and women have become victims of the country’s many plagues: opium addiction, widespread corruption, poverty, domestic violence and child marriage.

These are not problems unique to Afghanistan. They are found all around the world, in developing and developed nations. But in the landscape of a country ruined by decades of war, these crises have exploded.

The custom of bacha posh allows girls to dress as boys until puberty, but does a taste of freedom make the restrictions of life as a woman harder to bear?

I happened to read a New York Times article that explored the Afghan bacha posh tradition (converting young girls into boys by cutting their hair, changing their names and donning boys’ clothing). The community accepts the charade because there is a collective understanding that a family needs sons to have honor and to have someone who can go to the market freely or work outside the home. It struck me that the bacha posh tradition was an incredibly problematic practice. It gave young girls a taste of life as a boy in a deeply patriarchal society. But what would happen when that “boy” hit puberty? That’s when these boys are converted back to girls, sent back into their homes and stripped of the liberties they enjoyed for a few years.

Is it better to have tasted that liberty, if only for a short time? Or does that make life as a woman even harder to bear?

The article also touched on a time in Afghan history when women were disguised as men to serve as guards for the king’s harem. A storyline began to form in my mind, linking two different girls, in two different times, both dressed as boys in Afghanistan. Rahima is a young bacha posh who is married off by her opium-​addicted father to a local warlord. Her great-great-grandmother, Shekiba, is an orphan of the cholera epidemic who is forced to rely on her own strength and determination to survive and finds herself serving as a guard in King Habibullah’s harem. Rahima’s will is strengthened by learning her ancestor’s story. She knows she is the legacy of a formidable woman, and that knowledge helps her survive her bleakest days. Through their connection, I wanted to trace the history of women in the country.

The Pearl That Broke Its Shell is a novel with two stories steeped in tragedy, but if you put your ear to the ground, you can hear the rumblings of a brighter tomorrow coming. I could not bear to tell the story if I did not believe that to be true.

Afghanistan was once a country where sisters held the same potential as their brothers. Things fell apart in the years of bloodshed, and girls have suffered unimaginably. I wanted to give a voice to those girls of Afghanistan, the ones who are bartered in marriage before their time, denied a chance to sit in a classroom and turned into mothers before they can live out their childhoods.

Change is coming, though. We have our first female pilots, generals, political leaders, performers, scientists and athletes in decades. I am hopeful that they will forge the way to a future where Rahima’s story will be a tale from Afghanistan’s darker past.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Born in America to Afghani parents, author Nadia Hashimi grew up hearing her parents’ stories of the thriving Afghanistan they left in the 1970s. But when she finally visited decades later, she found a struggling country that bore little resemblance to their memories—especially in the way women were treated. Because of the increasing restrictions on female freedom, the custom of  bacha posh, the practice of dressing a daughter as a son, has become common. Hashimi’s first novel, The Pearl That Broke Its Shell, traces that modern tradition back to its possible origin, a time when women dressed as men to guard the king’s harem. Here, the author explains how these two cultural flashpoints inspired her debut.

Behind the Book by

Born in the U.S. Virgin Islands, writer Tiphanie Yanique spins her debut novel from that country's rich history. The saga of one remarkable family across generations, Land of Love and Drowning draws from folklore as well as real-life events, and the result is a magical first novel. In a behind-the-book essay, Yanique explains how she combined the truth from old wives tales with the facts from history books to create a unique truth.


"The master race in front!” The shouting men barged onto the bus in their uniforms. The passengers shrunk down out of shock and fear as the men broke down the wooden sign that read “Coloreds” at the back of the bus. The men themselves were nonwhite, but their uniforms were those of the U.S. Army. This made what the men were saying very strange and very frightening. The bus driver ducked from behind the wheel and ran into the street.

In the U.S. Virgin Islands there are many stories about the anti-segregation disruption caused by the local men who served in the military during World War II. This one in particular is the story I was told about what happened when some of the men from the so-called West Indian Companies were stationed in New Orleans. My great uncle Sigurd Peterson Sr. and my grandfather Andre Galiber Sr. were both part of this civil disobedience. Sigurd was mostly Danish, but he had a brownish tinge to his skin, either from being born and raised in the Caribbean or because of the remaining diversity in his bloodline. Andre was mostly black, descended from Africans, but there were also Asians and white Europeans in his ancestry.

These soldiers, born in the U.S. Virgin Islands, had never experienced segregation before—certainly not in a formal way. Their shouts of “master race” was newly acquired jargon . . . a racist jargon to be sure, but shouted from their darker faces and Caribbean mouths it was subversive enough to get them put in jail or lynched. But actually, what race were these men anyway? Some of them seemed white. Others looked black. Yet they were declaring themselves to be of the same race.

That the men declared themselves the master race was peculiar because they were of mixed racial background. If they were of the master race, then it meant that everyone could be, perhaps that everyone was. These men tore down the sign of bigotry, but they didn’t erect another. Later, Jesse Owens, the African American gold medalist who at the time served in the state department as a sort of consultant on race relations, was brought in to calm the Virgin Islands soldiers and explain the reasoning behind segregation. The soldiers booed Owens until he had to be escorted out.

"An old wives’ tale is generally thought to come from myth and superstition, and so should be considered with derision. . . . In my family, however, it is the older women who are the historians."

As is the case with many former soldiers, no one wanted to openly talk about the conflicts they had. Sigurd and Andre never offered this story. But there was the story anyway, corroborated by many of the women who knew them. The soldiers had been twice segregated. Not only separated by white and black, they were also set aside in their own West Indian companies, segregated from the other American companies, the white and the black ones. They and their compatriots had participated in a vital struggle. I researched this episode and others in books I dug up in the library and found in the bookstores. But I first learned it from the wives, girlfriends and daughters of these men.

Land of Love and Drowning is narrated by the “old wives” of the island. They are the ones who receive and pass on the stories, including this one about the soldiers in New Orleans. An "old wives’ tale" is generally a label given to a story thought to come from myth and superstition, and so should be considered with derision. But worse, an old wives’ tale is one that is often considered false in part because it is told by old women.

In my family, however, it is the older women who are the historians. So in Land of Love and Drowning I made the old wives the authoritative narrators. Other narrators (a male, and two younger women) tell their versions. But it is the old wives who, because of their age, have a long view of the history and, because of their intimate relationships (lovers and mothers), have the deepest understanding of the community. They are not the always the political actors in the novel but they are the recorders. They are the historians.

I wrote many parts of Land of Love and Drowning based on the history I first learned from my grandmother. It is was the story of the male soldiers, my real ancestors, who helped me frame the novel within the political framework of the Virgin Islands becoming American. Virgin Islands soldiers fought aggressively and publically against Jim Crow—and they did so while in U.S. military uniform. These men in my family helped make a small part of history that sealed the Virgin Islands to Americanness. But I needed the old wives to tell me the history to begin with. 

RELATED IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of this book.

Land of Love and Drowning is narrated by the “old wives” of the island. They are the ones who receive and pass on the stories, including this one about the soldiers in New Orleans. An old wives’ tale is generally a label given to a tale thought to come from myth and superstition, and so should be considered with derision. But worse, an old wives’ tale is one that is often considered false in part because it is told by old women.

Review by

Recent years have brought exciting new novels from Nigerian-born novelists like Helen Oyeyemi, Chris Abani and, of course, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The latest addition to that list is Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, whose strikingly accomplished new novel I Do Not Come to You by Chance takes the reader straight into the world of Nigerian 419s–the scams that begin with an email designed to deplete the savings accounts of a gullible recipient.

I Do Not Come to You by Chance tells the story of Kingsley Ibe, fresh out of college with an engineering degree but unable to find a job. He tries to do everything the honest way (and the way his parents expect him to), but without a long leg, the Nigerian term for someone who knows someone who can help, he remains unemployed. This is a big problem for an opara, or elder son, who is responsible for the well-being of the family. After his father’s health takes a downward turn and his sweetheart, Ola, leaves him for a wealthier suitor, Kinsgley turns for a loan to his uncle Boniface, also known as Cash Daddy, who runs a successful empire of 419s. As the family situation grows more dire, Cash Daddy’s offers get sweeter, and before you know it, Kingsley is the #2 man, assisting Cash Daddy with large-scale scams and raking in the money.

Education may be the language of success in Nigeria, Nwaubani suggests, but it is money that does the talking. Kingsley suffers from initial attacks of conscience but soon he is delighted in the utter confidence and pleasure money brings. He wheels and deals and supports his brothers and sister in a style to which they all too soon grow accustomed. But accepting Cash Daddy’s charity does have consequences–eventual parental disapproval, combined with Kingsley’s loneliness, makes him question his difficult choices all over again.

Nwaubani sets Kingsley’s trip down the slippery slope of corruption against the backdrop of daily life in small-town Nigeria. She never shies away from the illegality of the scams, but she is tuned in to the subtle ways that people justify their involvement in criminal activity, especially when they feel that following the rules has gotten them nowhere. It is the ultimate irony that the globalization that has made the 419 scams so successful has also opened the doors to this remarkable piece of fiction.

Recent years have brought exciting new novels from Nigerian-born novelists like Helen Oyeyemi, Chris Abani and, of course, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The latest addition to that list is Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, whose strikingly accomplished new novel I Do Not Come to You by Chance takes the reader straight into the world of Nigerian 419s–the scams […]
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n October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first man-made satellite, Sputnik I, into space. It orbited the earth for three months before re-entering the atmosphere and burning up. Widely regarded in the West as a military threat, Sputnik I simply sent a static-laden signal back to earth, each beep heralding the dawn of the space race that would dictate East-West relations for two decades.

Half a lifetime later, Haruki Murakami brings us Sputnik Sweetheart, a wise, sad and loving look at how we are each satellites in sometimes decaying orbit around one another. Three characters dominate the book: the unnamed male author, a grade-school teacher in modern day Japan; Sumire, the object of his unrequited affection, a free-spirited post-beatnik he has known since his college days; and Miu, a glamorous and successful businesswoman who has rather unexpectedly captured Sumire’s heart. “Sumire sighed, gazed up at the ceiling for a while, and lit her cigarette. It’s pretty strange if you think about it, she thought. Here I am in love for the first time in my life, at age twenty-two. And the other person just happens to be a woman.” When Miu invites her new protŽgŽ to accompany her on a whirlwind business trip to Europe, Sumire happily agrees. On an unnamed Greek Island off the coast of Turkey (Lesbos?), however, things go horribly awry. The teacher awakens to a frantic phone call from Miu summoning him to Greece in search of Sumire, who has gone missing in the wake of a cataclysmic evening. The teacher establishes a tenuous yet intimate bond with Miu as they ransack the beach cottage for clues. Bit by excruciating bit, pieces of Sumire’s last days float to the surface as the police and her loved ones try to make sense of her disappearance. In Sputnik Sweetheart, his seventh novel translated into English, Murakami again displays the minimalist craftsmanship that has made him a critic’s darling both in Asia and the West. Perhaps better than any contemporary writer, he captures and lays bare the raw human emotion of longing.

An interesting factoid picked up in the reading: the ominous Sputnik, which held the world in paranoid thrall for months, was about the size of a beach ball.

Bruce Tierney is a Nashville-based writer.

n October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first man-made satellite, Sputnik I, into space. It orbited the earth for three months before re-entering the atmosphere and burning up. Widely regarded in the West as a military threat, Sputnik I simply sent a static-laden signal back to earth, each beep heralding the dawn of […]
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If Salman Rushdie praises your work as lush and the New Yorker publishes one of your stories before you are old enough to rent a car, chances are that you are talented. Kiran Desai has talent in spades, an her debut Hullaballo in the Guava Orchard leaves readers wishing the novel had just kept going. Desai writes unerringly about the triumph of failure, the circularity of life, and endears herself with a particular examination of Indian culture that resonates with universal themes. Reviewed by Mark Luce.

If Salman Rushdie praises your work as lush and the New Yorker publishes one of your stories before you are old enough to rent a car, chances are that you are talented. Kiran Desai has talent in spades, an her debut Hullaballo in the Guava Orchard leaves readers wishing the novel had just kept going. […]
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In the spirit of the season, we have gathered a group of new novels that delightfully explore the elusive nature of love. If you’re looking for fresh insights concerning the inscrutable ways of Cupid, then peruse the books below. Here’s to true love!

A VERY LITERARY ROMANCE
Fans of old-fashioned amour will cozy up to Love Letters. The novel’s leading lady, Laura Horsley, is a bibliophile to the bone. When her bookstore closes and she finds herself out of a job, she impulsively joins the organizing committee of a literary festival. A misunderstanding leads the committee to believe that she has inside connections to Dermot Flynn, a celebrated writer notorious for his love of privacy. Laura, who has adored Dermot’s work since her university days, is dispatched to Ireland to sign him up for the festival. Can she charm the reclusive author into participating? It’s an incredible mission, and one that seems doomed to fail when Laura finally meets the difficult Dermot. Wrestling with his latest work, he’s moody and gruff, yet Laura finds him irresistible, and as she tries to commit him to the festival, the events that transpire defy her wildest fantasies of fandom. With Laura, British author Katie Fforde has created a spirited heroine the reader can’t help rooting for, and she spins her adventures into an unforgettable story. This hilarious romance will convince the harshest cynic that love conquers all.

DATING IN THE DIGITAL AGE
A shrewd depiction of romance in an era of instant connection, Teresa Medeiros’ Goodnight, Tweetheart demonstrates the ways in which courting via computer can expedite seduction—but also trick the heart and muddle the mind. So it goes for the story’s central character, novelist Abby Donovan. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, Abby’s a writer with serious aspirations. How, then, to account for her addiction to Twitter, the famous social networking site that’s a bit, well, frivolous?

Led to the website by her publicist, Abby intends, at first, to tweet only for promotional purposes, but business gives way to romance when she connects with the bookish “MarkBaynard,” a charmer who can pack poetry into the briefest tweet. As the two forge an online relationship, Abby finds it increasingly difficult to concentrate on her work. Her story unfolds, in part, through tweets and direct messages, as she compulsively corresponds with a guy who seems, onscreen, like Mr. Right. But how much does Abby really know about Mark? The mysteries and questions Medeiros puts into play are timeless, and they give extra depth to this cleverly crafted tale.

L’AMOUR PARISIAN
A poet, food critic and radio personality, Hervé Le Tellier is known in France as a Renaissance man. His 15th book, a piece of chic, contemporary fiction called Enough About Love, chronicles the turbulent romantic lives of a group of well-to-do Parisians. Elegant, accomplished and on the brink of 40, Anna has a solid marriage and a pair of adorable children. Yet when she meets Yves, an offbeat writer, she’s more than a little intrigued. Likewise, Louise—a successful lawyer, wife and mother—experiences sparks with Thomas, who happens to be Anna’s psychiatrist.

Blindsided by emotion, the lives of all four lovers are transformed virtually overnight. This provocative novel unfolds in brief chapters, each of which offers the perspective of a different character, creating a richly textured mosaic of incident and emotion. For Anna and Louise, the comforts of family are threatened by surprising and potent passion. It’s a classic battle—sudden desire versus the long-cultivated bonds of monogamy—and Le Tellier uses the conflict to explore the difficult decisions that so often accompany love. A wise and witty writer, he brings Parisian flair to this tale of romantic entanglement.

LOVE WITHOUT LIMITS
A sensitive rendering of a remarkable friendship, The Intimates, Ralph Sassone’s accomplished debut novel, examines love in its many varied forms and the demands it makes on the human heart. Kindred spirits, Robbie and Maize gravitate toward each other in high school, but romance fails to blossom between them. Instead, they become steadfast friends, attending the same college and supporting each other as they enter the “real world.” Both struggle to make sense of adolescence even as they embark upon adulthood. Maize—at heart a sensitive writer-type—goes into real estate in New York City but finds the experience, to put it mildly, disillusioning. Meanwhile, Robbie, who has vague designs on the publishing industry, explores romantic relationships with men.

Although Robbie and Maize are driven by desires that change with time and experience, their special intimacy—a passionate yet platonic tie—endures. With authenticity and an eye for the subtle machinations that can make or break relationships, Sassone has produced a moving, often funny novel that beautifully reflects the complexities of love.

In the spirit of the season, we have gathered a group of new novels that delightfully explore the elusive nature of love. If you’re looking for fresh insights concerning the inscrutable ways of Cupid, then peruse the books below. Here’s to true love! A VERY LITERARY ROMANCEFans of old-fashioned amour will cozy up to Love […]
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Sea of Poppies takes place in 1838, when the opium trade between British-ruled India and China was in full swing. Opium factories employed hundreds, and farmers were obliged to clear their fields for opium production. Ships that once carried slaves were refitted to carry opium, as well as indentured servants, to other parts of the Empire. Meanwhile, China was determined to stop the trade that turned thousands into addicts. At the center of this saga is the Ibis, an immense ship with a British captain, an American second mate, Indian troops and a crew of Lascars—a term that was used to identify sailors originating from the Pacific Rim. The ship has docked in Calcutta awaiting the arrival of men and women traveling to Mauritius as indentured migrants. The range of characters is as diverse as their lingo, social standing and skin color, yet accomplished novelist Amitav Ghosh suggests the differences are illusory. Clothed in a sari, the orphaned daughter of a French botanist is able to blend in among the migrant workers; the biracial second mate realizes that passing as white can work to his advantage; and a Bengali accountant filled with the spirit of a deceased holy woman begins to experience a shift in gender. Most powerfully, a rich, pampered rajah, charged with bankruptcy, is jailed aboard the Ibis with a derelict opium addict. Though brought low in the utter filth of his shared cell, he is still able to make a treasured human connection.

Ghosh revels in the unique vocabulary of his British, American, French, Indian and Lascar characters, providing a Babel of colloquial phrases and obscure naval terms. Readers can use the glossary at the end of the book, but it’s easy enough to catch the tone of the dialogue, where at least the gist is clear. Sea of Poppies is the first in a planned trilogy, which may be why the action in the last quarter of the book steps up to a feverish pace. You can almost hear the narrative gears grinding as Ghosh maneuvers everyone into place to create a cliffhanger ending. But this doesn’t take away from the rollicking energy and heart of a very engaging novel.

Lauren Bufferd writes from Nashville.

This review refers to the Oct. 2008 hardcover edition.

Sea of Poppies takes place in 1838, when the opium trade between British-ruled India and China was in full swing. Opium factories employed hundreds, and farmers were obliged to clear their fields for opium production. Ships that once carried slaves were refitted to carry opium, as well as indentured servants, to other parts of the […]
Review by

Sea of Poppies takes place in 1838, when the opium trade between British – ruled India and China was in full swing. Opium factories employed hundreds, and farmers were obliged to clear their fields for opium production. Ships that once carried slaves were refitted to carry opium, as well as indentured servants, to other parts of the Empire. Meanwhile, China was determined to stop the trade that turned thousands into addicts. At the center of this saga is the Ibis, an immense ship with a British captain, an American second mate, Indian troops and a crew of Lascars – a term that was used to identify sailors originating from the Pacific Rim. The ship has docked in Calcutta awaiting the arrival of men and women traveling to Mauritius as indentured migrants. The range of characters is as diverse as their lingo, social standing and skin color, yet accomplished novelist Amitav Ghosh suggests the differences are illusory. Clothed in a sari, the orphaned daughter of a French botanist is able to blend in among the migrant workers; the biracial second mate realizes that passing as white can work to his advantage; and a Bengali accountant filled with the spirit of a deceased holy woman begins to experience a shift in gender. Most powerfully, a rich, pampered rajah, charged with bankruptcy, is jailed aboard the Ibis with a derelict opium addict. Though brought low in the utter filth of his shared cell, he is still able to make a treasured human connection.

Ghosh revels in the unique vocabulary of his British, American, French, Indian and Lascar characters, providing a Babel of colloquial phrases and obscure naval terms. Readers can use the glossary at the end of the book, but it’s easy enough to catch the tone of the dialogue, where at least the gist is clear. Sea of Poppies is the first in a planned trilogy, which may be why the action in the last quarter of the book steps up to a feverish pace. You can almost hear the narrative gears grinding as Ghosh maneuvers everyone into place to create a cliffhanger ending. But this doesn’t take away from the rollicking energy and heart of a very engaging novel. Lauren Bufferd writes from Nashville.

Sea of Poppies takes place in 1838, when the opium trade between British – ruled India and China was in full swing. Opium factories employed hundreds, and farmers were obliged to clear their fields for opium production. Ships that once carried slaves were refitted to carry opium, as well as indentured servants, to other parts […]
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His literary arrival already hailed by the likes of Salman Rushdie and John Updike, Ardashir Vakil has a reputation to live up to with this, his very first novel. Rushdie, who knows an authentic voice when he hears one, has excerpted Beach Boy in his new anthology of the most brilliant Indian writing of the past 50 years since his and Vakil’s native country gained independence in 1948. Both writers now live in London, but both are still emotionally immersed in the life of India’s most populous and varied city. They continue to live and breathe Bombay.

Beach Boy is in the classic mode of the coming-of-age story. Its hero is only a bit younger than usual a very precocious, even highly sexed eight-year-old. Cyrus Readymoney belongs to Bombay’s privileged Parsi class, those adherents to Zoroastrianism who have been largely Westernized. He feels no guilt about his family’s wealth in a city of grinding poverty, and his closest adult friend is a holdover from the Imperial regime, an eccentric and brilliantly evoked maharani. Rather neglected by his social (and adulterous) parents, Cyrus wanders all over Bombay, usually in search of Hindi and Hollywood cinema. He even pretends, with some success, to be an Indian child film star. His fantasy life injects both humor and pathos in Vakil’s portrait.

Set in the early ’70s, the novel is clearly autobiographical. Even if Vakil’s own adolescence didn’t so closely parallel Cyrus’s, the luxurious sensory detail of the story would reveal the author’s teeming memory of the sights, sounds, and, most of all, tastes of his setting. Cyrus loves to eat, and one of the richest pleasures of the book is in vicarious feasting. Wherever our young voyeur goes, he’s sure to find food and, with few exceptions, sure to relish it.

A bit of a thief and a rogue, an eavesdropper and a liar, Cyrus is reminiscent of Truffaut’s hero in The 400 Blows. Like Truffaut, Vakil lets the story unfold through character and incident, not formal plot. And the characters are vivid and unique from Cyrus’s love interest (the adopted daughter of the maharani) to his imperious Aunt Zenobia and his neighbor Mr. Krishnan, a thundering but lovable Communist. The boy’s immediate family only gradually come into focus, however, and for good reason. By the end of the novel, great sorrow will come to the Readymoneys, and Cyrus will confront a harsher world. With Arundhati Roy’s best-selling The God of Small Things and Vikram Chandra’s wonderful Love and Longing in Bombay, Indian literature seems to be entering a golden age. Beach Boy has been touched by Midas too, and Ardashir Vakil is on the threshold of what could be a gilded career.

His literary arrival already hailed by the likes of Salman Rushdie and John Updike, Ardashir Vakil has a reputation to live up to with this, his very first novel. Rushdie, who knows an authentic voice when he hears one, has excerpted Beach Boy in his new anthology of the most brilliant Indian writing of the […]
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In his wildly inventive new novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie offers up a modern tale set in the international firmament of pop music. This is the writer who infuriated a sizable portion of the Muslim world with The Satanic Verses, so don’t expect a trite cautionary tale of decadent glamour and eventual comeuppance a la Jackie Collins. Rushdie has more than drugs, sex, and rock-and-roll on his mind. Much more. His lengthy, allusion-packed narrative is, in fact, a riff on the Orpheus myth, in which said hero must descend into the underworld to reclaim his love.

The novel begins at nearly the end of the story, as legendary singer Vina Apsara vanishes from the face of the earth during an earthquake. With Vina when she is presumably swallowed up is a photographer named Rai, who becomes the narrator of the book. Rai (whose real name, Umeed Merchant, can be translated as "seller of hope") has known Vina since they were both children in Bombay. As her constant friend and sometimes lover, he becomes the somewhat unwilling Boswell for her and for Ormus Cama, a giant of musical talent and the love of Vina’s life.

The story these three share begins in India, and ricochets around the globe — London, New York, Mexico, Southeast Asia. Rushdie cleverly constructs a parallel, though hardly less turbulent, history for the last 60 years, with the British in Vietnam along with the Americans, Kennedy narrowly escaping assassination, and Watergate just the fictional plot of a pulp thriller. Against this hyperbolic backdrop, Ormus and Vina are separated and reunited more than once, and both rise to the pinnacle of stardom. But their star-crossed love, mythic and transcendent, never seems to survive on solid ground. Rushdie’s breathless, often funny prose is laced with real and imagined song lyrics, and informed by countless references to Eastern and Western gods, both secular and divine. Indeed, throughout The Ground Beneath Her Feet, there is a startling juxtaposition of opposites: English v. Indian cultures, the terrestrial v. the unearthly, the often ridiculous world of celebrity v. the intrinsic human need for a spiritual grounding. It’s as if, for Rushdie, the earth can’t bear the weight of such contradiction and must, in the end, give way to the inevitable cataclysm, devouring the folly of our human endeavors.

In his wildly inventive new novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie offers up a modern tale set in the international firmament of pop music. This is the writer who infuriated a sizable portion of the Muslim world with The Satanic Verses, so don’t expect a trite cautionary tale of decadent glamour and eventual […]

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