October 1, 2022
Following Hargrave's adult debut, the Betty Trask honoree The Mercies, The Dance Tree spins off from real-life events as it visits 1518 Strasbourg, France, where women have begun dancing wildly in the town square and provoked a state of emergency (40,000-copy first printing). Opening in a fishing village in British colonial--ruled Singapore, Suicide Club author Heng's The Great Reclamation features a sweet boy with an extraordinary gift--he sees shifting islands no one else can--who comes of age during the Japanese occupation and, with a neighborhood girl, ends up remapping the future (75,000-copy first printing). Following the multi-best-booked Yellow Wind, Johnson's The House of Eve intertwines the stories of two young Black women--15-year-old Ruby, whose college ambitions are threatened by an ill-advised affair, and Howard University student Eleanor, looking for acceptance from her boyfriend's elite Black family. In Loesch's debut, The Last Russian Doll, a Russian �migr� studying at Oxford returns to Moscow after her mother's death and uncovers a family tragedy stretching back to the 1917 Revolution. A prize winner in Germany and a publishing phenomenon there and in the UK, where Berlin-based British-Ghanian Otoo is a Cambridge writer in residence, Ada's Room features four Adas: a 15th-century West African woman who confronts a Portuguese slave trader, Victorian England's Ada Lovelace, a Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp inmate, and a contemporary resident of Berlin, connected to them all in spirit. Following The Yellow Bird Sings, a National Jewish Book Award finalist, Rosner's Once We Were Home builds on real-life events to tell the stories of Jewish children wrenched from their families during World War II--like Ana, who remembers the mother who smuggled her out of a Polish ghetto, and Ana's brother, who knows only the family who raised him. In Spence-Ash's Beyond That, the Sea, Bea Thompson is sent from bomb-blasted World War II London to live in safety with a family in Boston, MA, and becomes so contented with her new life that she is reluctant to return home (150,000-copy first printing). From the No. 1 New York Times best-selling Walls, Hang the Moon follows the life of feisty young Sallie Kincaid, daughter of the big man about town in Prohibition-era Virginia, who's back home to reclaim her place nine years after being ejected from the family. The USA Today best-selling Webb's Strangers in the Night replays the romance between Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner (100,000-copy paperback and 30,000-copy hardcover first printing). In Two Wars and a Wedding, the New York Times best-selling Willig follows aspiring archaeologist Betsy Hayes from 1896 Greece, where she ends up tending the wounded as fighting breaks out with Turkey, and 1898 Cuba, where she serves with the Red Cross during the Spanish American War, hoping to find a lost friend (75,000-copy first printing).
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February 15, 2023
The twentieth century saw Singapore transform from a British colony into an independent nation. This dizzying historical period forms the backdrop of Ah Boon's life. The youngest son of a fisherman, Ah Boon is uncertain of his place in the world. He alone can find a set of islands that disappear at random. With this ability comes prosperity for his family and the respect of his village. As his confidence grows, so does his love for Siok Mei, a militant girl who serves as the co-protagonist. Fans of Heng's sf-tinged debut, Suicide Club (2018), might expect the speculative element to play a bigger role, but the islands are an important plot point for the first hundred pages or so, then lose relevance for long stretches of time. Much more developed is Ah Boon's evolving relationship to authority. As Ah Boon grows into adulthood, Heng paints a striking portrait of a man struggling to find his place in history. The novel is ultimately a well-rendered piece of historical fiction that questions who gets left behind in the march toward progress.
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Starred review from April 3, 2023
Heng (Suicide Club) charts the course of Singapore’s independence through the story of a child who makes a fateful discovery. In 1941, seven-year-old Lee Ah Boon finds a cluster of islands hitherto unknown to the fishing village he lives in. Over the difficult years of Japanese occupation during WWII and the postwar period of self-governance under British rule, the mysterious islands prove to be an abundant source of fish. Then, local government officials, colloquially known as the Gah Men, propose a land reclamation project to build new housing. The landfill that results threatens the islands and the livelihood of the villagers, and it presents Boon with a difficult decision as a young man—should he defend his old life as a fisherman or fall in with the anticommunist Gah Men in the march toward progress? Heng wrings a great deal of emotion from Boon’s experiences and relationships, notably a childhood friend who becomes a leftist and resists the Gah Men, and articulates the individual sacrifices and the inevitable divides that arise in nation building, skillfully capturing the inner psyche of a Singaporean everyman caught between two immovable worlds. This epic undertaking is not to be missed. Agent: Julie Barer, Book Group.
Starred review from February 1, 2023
A fearful, tender, unexpectedly gifted boy in a Singapore fishing village finds that his fate is inextricably wound with that of his community. "Decades later, the kampong would trace it all back to this very hour, waves draining the light from this slim, hungry moon." So begins Heng's second novel, a story scaffolded against a sweeping backdrop--the politics of colonialism, World War II in Southeast Asia, ecology, the inexorable forces of development and modernization--with very little of that ever mentioned, instead focusing on the experiences of the characters in language of perfect simplicity. It begins in 1941, when the territory of Singapore is "still governed by the Ang Mohs as it had been for the past century." A small boy named Ah Boon goes out fishing with his Pa and somehow intuits the location of a mysterious island where the fish run denser than their nets can carry. This is the watershed hour referred to in the opening sentence, and its immediate effects are wholly positive. "While previously they'd subsisted on thin gruel with sweet potato, stringy bean sprouts, and the occasional scrawny chicken, now they feasted, day and night, on fish. They steamed them with ginger and freshly cut chilies; they chopped them up and saut�ed the pieces with fragrant sambal, they fried them till the fins grew crispy, a delicious treat for the children." Meanwhile, Ah Boon has become close with his brilliant schoolmate Siok Mei, who was virtually orphaned when her parents left the country for political reasons but now shares with Ah Boon many idyllic days of childhood. The good times screech to a halt when war arrives and the Japanese occupation begins. After upheavals and tragedies, the story moves into the postwar period, when the Gah Men (as the people who run the country are known) begin a massive earth-moving project to reshape the coastline. Here Ah Boon's unique relationship to the landscape will again play a critical role even as he dons the white shirt and white pants and round, wire-rimmed glasses of a Gah Man. Heng's development of this character is absolutely brilliant and deserves wide notice. Like a drop of rain that holds the reflection of the world, crystalline and beautiful.
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