A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
2015 PEN/Hemingway Award, Finalist
A fiercely assured debut novel about four second-generation
Chinese sisters, one of whom happens
to be a boy.
At birth, Peter Huang is given the Chinese name
Juan Chaun, “powerful king.” To his parents, newly
settled in small-town Ontario, he is the exalted
only son in a sea of daughters, the one who will finally fulfill his immigrant
father’s dreams of Western masculinity.
Malaya, 1951. Yun Ling Teoh, the scarred lone
survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp, seeks
solace among the jungle-fringed tea plantations of
Cameron Highlands. There she discovers Yugiri,
the only Japanese garden in Malaya, and its owner
and creator, the enigmatic Aritomo, exiled former
gardener of the emperor of Japan. Despite her
hatred of the Japanese, Yun Ling seeks to engage
Aritomo to create a garden in memory of her
sister, who died in the camp. Aritomo refuses but agrees to accept Yun
Ling as his apprentice “until the monsoon comes.”
Man Booker Prize Winner
A Best Books of the Year: The New York Times,
NPR, The Washington Post, The Minneapolis
Star-Tribune, The Economist, The Seattle Times,
Financial Times
August, 1943: Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans
is haunted by his affair with his uncle’s young
wife two years earlier. His life, in a brutal Japanese POW camp on the
Thai-Burma Death Railway,
Set against the tumultuous background of apartheid South Africa, a powerful and moving debut about family, sacrifice, and discovering what it means to belong…
Celia Mphephu knows her place in the world. A black servant working in the white suburbs of 1960s Johannesburg, she’s all too aware of her limitations. Nonetheless, she has found herself a comfortable corner: She has a job, can support her faraway family, and is raising her youngest child, Miriam.
But as racial tensions explode, Celia’s world shifts. Her employers decide to flee the political turmoil and move to England—and they ask to adopt Miriam and take her with them.
Self-deception and betrayal are Elizabeth Taylor’s
great subjects, and in A View of the Harbour she
turns her unsparing gaze on the emotional and
sexual politics of a seedy seaside town that’s been
left behind by modernity. Tory, recently divorced,
depends more and more on the company of her
neighbors Robert, a doctor, and Beth, a busy author
of melodramatic novels. Prudence, Robert and
Beth’s daughter, disapproves of the intimacy that has grown between her
parents and Tory and the gossip it has awakened in their little community.
Claire Takata has never known much about her
father, who passed away ten years ago. But on the
anniversary of his death, she finds a letter from
her deceased father to her stepfather. Before now,
Claire never had a reason to believe they even
knew each other.
Struggling to understand why her parents kept this
surprising history hidden, Claire combs through
anything that might give her information about her father . . . until she
discovers that he was a member of the yakuza,
