The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng [in Bloomsbury Review]
IF YOU READ ONE BOOK, LET IT BE THIS EPIC STUNNER! One rainy evening, an elderly gentleman finds himself opening the door to his past in the form an elderly woman who arrives bearing a gift....
IF YOU READ ONE BOOK, LET IT BE THIS EPIC STUNNER! One rainy evening, an elderly gentleman finds himself opening the door to his past in the form an elderly woman who arrives bearing a gift....
Based on more than 80-year-old actual immigration interviews, Laurence Yep imagines the conversation he never had with his father about his father’s experiences as a nervous young boy who arrived on Angel Island, the West Coast...
Pakistani dictator General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s sudden death in a mysterious 1988 plane crash remains unsolved. Hanif, once part of the Pakistani air force and now a British expat, cleverly presents a riotous fictional version of how...
At the heart of M.G. Vassanji's sixth novel, The Assassin's Song, is an exercise in perspective. Definitions of right and wrong, truth and deception, the chosen and outcast – especially in matters having to do with...
Su Qi, a sensitive Chinese Malaysian youth, comes of age in the magical jungles of Borneo, shaped by the cruelty he witnesses at the hands of his abusive father and his loving but withdrawn mother. He...
“Beat” Takeshi Kitano, most widely known as an acclaimed filmmaker, is indeed a Renaissance man. Besides making films, he’s an actor, comedian, major TV personality, poet, painter, and novelist – and most likely more. While he...
Ruffling Feathers: An Interview with Novelist Sabina Murray
Sabina Murray’s published output over the past five years has been substantial by anyone’s standards: three books, five screenplays, umpteen short stories, and winning the prestigious 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award....
A few cheesy, overwritten scenes aside, this is one stunning debut novel that will make you weak in the knees. Sam Hamada, U.S.-born but raised in Japan, arrives at age 9 in Hawai‘i in 1930 to...
Loss dominates the lives of the inhabitants of a crumbling, stately home on the Indian-Nepali border along the Himalayas. The Cambridge University-educated, self-hating judge’s isolated life is disrupted by the arrival of his young granddaughter, Sai,...
From the prolific Laurence Yep, last year’s Laura Ingalls Wilder Award winner for substantial achievement in children’s literature, comes the quickly-moving story of the devastating 1906 earthquake and the inevitable great fire, told through the experiences...
A loving tribute, memoir-style, to the author’s father, a South Vietnamese pilot shot down during the Vietnam War and assumed dead. Pham and his mother begin a new life in the United...
First reaction: WOW! Second reaction: Read it! The story revolves around the Harmony Silk Factory, a textiles shop in rural Malaysia run by Johnny Lim, part crook, part untouchable legend.
Three narrators...
Talk about bad first impression: Reading the jacket cover description with the glaring spelling error, “Shitimachi” (what does that sound like?!) instead of the correct “Shitamachi” (which literally means ‘below-town’ or more...
Genius Han Ong: The Outsider American
Han Ong, who made international headlines as one of the MacArthur Foundation’s elite Genius Grant recipients of 1997, refers to his second novel, The Disinherited, as his “imagined homecoming”...
A haunting, lovingly illustrated story, told from the point of view of a basket that serves three generations of a Nepali family. As the basket's frail, aged owner is about to be left on...
The final installation in Mehta’s 11-title series, Continents of Exile, explores his father’s love affair with another woman, documented through their love letters – the eponymous Red Letters. Written without judgment following the deaths...
From one of the bad-boy editors of Aiiieeeee! comes the story of an energetic search for identity through many continents by one Christopher Columbus Wong. Wong...
Returning to the Real World After the MacArthur Grant
Han Ong, who made international headlines as one of the MacArthur Foundation’s elite “Genius Grant” recipients of 1997, refers to his second novel, The Disinherited, as...
Flying Aloft with Chang-rae Lee
Speaking in superlatives about Chang-rae Lee or his work seems somewhat clichéd these days. All three of his novels, Native Speaker, A Gesture Life, and his latest, Aloft, have been so lavishly...
Ever wonder why so many Chinese restaurants have the word “dragon” in its name – like Golden Dragon around the corner from the AsianWeek office? Or how about...