VERTICAL MOTION
Can Xue
Translated from the Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping
Two young girls sneak onto the grounds of a hospital, where they find a disturbing moment of silence in a rose garden. A couple grows a plant that blooms underground, invisibly, to their long-time neighbor's consternation. A cat worries about its sleepwalking owner, who receives a mysterious visitor while he's asleep. After a ten-year absence, a young man visits his uncle, on the twenty-fourth floor of a high-rise that is floating in the air, while his ugly cousin hesitates on the stairs …
Can Xue is a master of the dreamscape, crafting stories that inhabit the space where fantasy and reality, time and timelessness, the quotidian and the extraordinary, meet. The stories in this striking and lyrical new collection—populated by old married couples, children, cats, and nosy neighbors, the entire menagerie of the everyday—reaffirm Can Xue's reputation as one of the most innovative Chinese writers in a generation.
Read an excerpt from this book or a review of this book in this issue.
Open Letter, paperback, 9781934824375
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A LOVESONG FOR INDIA: TALES FROM EAST AND WEST
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Taking us from a sweltering Indian rooftop at night to the marble halls of an aging Bollywood star's palace, this is a new collection of short stories from Man Booker Prize winner, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. A wedding is planned between two innocents at a crumbling mansion of a grand Hudson Valley estate, while among the white-socked convent girls of post-colonial New Delhi a mixed-race couple contemplate their son's alienation and the failure of hope. A young English girl infiltrates Fifth Avenue theatrical royalty and a lovely Broadway starlet exacts a clever, protracted revenge against her nemesis. Speaking of mortality and family rivalry, of the transfer of power from old to young, of love and the loss of innocence, A Lovesong for India is a delicious assortment of fairytales and parables.
Little, Brown; hardcover, 9781408703779 (October)
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WAITING FOR A WIDE HORSE SKY
Elaine Kennedy
The plight of migrant factory workers in South Korea leads Katoomba-based author Elaine Kennedy to question her own motives for travel and working in Daegu. Heartbreaking and surprisingly intimate, Kennedy's memoir is full of true drama and incident. This is a 'stranger than fiction' story that compels like the best written novels. The reader is drawn deeper and deeper into the beauties, mysteries and injustices that surround and disturb the author, while Kennedy's undercover fight to assist those who have come to Korea without her own privileges is tense and gripping. This original, warm and suspenseful story is peopled with wonderful characters and rings with the passion and authenticity of truth.
Elaine Kennedy grew up in Sydney's eastern suburbs and was involved with music and performance from an early age. Later that interest led to teaching high school music and English. She has subsequently worked overseas for government-initiated programs in Japan, Korea, China and the UK. While working in Korea in a teacher training institute she was introduced to migrant factory workers who were being exploited by their employers and lived under harsh conditions for little pay. In trying to help them and seek justice for them this book began to form and to take on an importance as a story that needed to be told.
Transit Lounge, paperback, 9781921924101 (September)
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FAR FROM MY FATHER'S HOUSE
Jill McGivering
Survival is hard in a land where no woman can live alone. Layla is just thirteen when the men with the beards and guns burn down her beloved father's school and begin to terrorise the Swat Valley region of Pakistan. She has to flee, exchanging the tranquil beauty of the Himalayas for the squalor of a camp for refugees from the Taliban near Peshawar. With her life torn apart by tragedy, Layla must choose between the old fashioned way of life with her family—or a journey into independence which could threaten her very survival. Trying to find out what lies behind mysterious deaths at the camp is foreign correspondent Ellen Thomas. As a strong woman in a man's world, Ellen is used to risking her life to uncover the truth. United by the gentle schoolteacher who had risked his life to save books, the paths of Layla and Ellen collide in a common cause.
HarperCollins, paperback, 9780007338191
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INDIAN TANGO
Ananda Devi
Translated from the French by Jean Anderson
Indian Tango, published in French in 2007, is set in Delhi in 2004, against a background of monsoon rains and the general election that would see Sonia Gandhi briefly head a coalition government. A visiting writer becomes obsessed by Subhadra, a woman glimpsed on the street, and as this unconventional relationship develops, the cost of pursuing passion and desire in a vibrant but deeply conservative society comes into sharp focus. A sometimes bitter, always moving meditation on the limitations placed on women's (and others') lives by convention builds inexorably to a powerful and stunning conclusion.
Ananda Devi was born in Mauritius in 1957. The multicultural and multilingual aspects of her birthplace are echoed in many of her works, which explore with lyrical and probing language and imagery the depths of conflicted identities, with a particular focus on women and the consequences of nonconformity. One of the Indian Ocean region's leading and most prolific writers, she has published poetry, three volumes of short stories and ten novels.
Host Publications, paperback, 9780924047817
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