Glorious Boy - Softcover

Liu, Aimee

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1597098892 ISBN 13: 9781597098892

Publisher: Red Hen Press, 2020

Synopsis

"For readers who are unafraid to be swept away." - Booklist, starred review

A World War II story unlike any you've ever read before, with characters and settings you'll never forget.

"The most memorable and original novel I've read... evokes every side in a multi-cultural conversation with sympathy and rare understanding." - Pico Iyer, author of The Art of Stillness
 
For fans of Michael Ondaatje's Warlight and Lily King's Euphoria...
Glorious Boy is a sweeping tale of war and devotion, longing and loss, and the power of love to prevail.
 
"Bound by ambition and a sense of adventure, Claire and Shep Durant journey to the Andaman Islands, a remote part of colonial India, in1936. They dive deep into their work: Claire, an anthropologist, is studying the language and customs of the Biya tribe; Shep, a surgeon, is collecting orchid specimens, hoping for significant medicinal applications. Claire's plans change when she becomes pregnant and gives birth to Ty, whose ability to speak never materializes and whose bond to Claire and Shep seems weaker than his attachment to Naila, a household employee. When the war escalates, the Andamans become a target, and the Durants prepare to evacuate-but Ty goes missing. Against her will, Claire goes on without her son and husband. The search for Ty is fraught with more danger than Shep could have ever imagined, and Claire must figure out how she can help from her new post in Calcutta. As the war churns on and hope dwindles, the entire family--biological and otherwise--will be forced to question their allegiances and obligations, and to determine what place is, for them, truly home." - Margo Littell, The Seattle Review

About this title

About the Author

Aimee Liu is the bestselling author of the novels Flash House, Cloud Mountain, and Face and the memoirs Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders and Solitaire. Her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages, published as a Literary Guild Super Release, and serialized in Good Housekeeping. She's received a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, a Bosque Fiction Prize, and special mention by the Pushcart Prize. Her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, Poets & Writers, and many other periodicals and anthologies. A past president of the national literary organization PEN Center USA, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College and taught in Goddard College's MFA in Creative Writing Program for many years. She lives in Los Angeles. More at aimeeliu.net

From the Back Cover

"In Glorious Boy, Aimee Liu tears a forgotten footnote from the history books and brings it to life in an epic tale of a family caught in a clash of cultures and loyalties during World War II. Set in a penal colony on the remote Andaman Islands, Glorious Boy is the whirlwind story of vanishing cultures, unbreakable codes, rebellion, occupation, and colonization, all swirling around the disappearance of a mute four-year-old boy on the eve of the Japanese occupation of Port Blair. A stirring indictment of the brutality that humanity is capable of, Liu's heartbreaking new novel of love, betrayal, and sacrifice is also a testament to the lengths we will go for the ones we love." - Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, author of Shadow Child and Hiroshima in the Morning

"An absolutely gorgeous historical novel about ambition, culture clash, love, atonement, and one silent boy, set against the backdrop of a tribe in the Andamans struggling with British rule. So blisteringly alive you feel the swampy heat and the bugs, so emotionally true, it grips at every page. Just magnificent and not to be missed." - Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You and Cruel Beautiful World

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

First, a small uninhabitable pincushion of palm trees appeared on the turquoise sea. Then a massive green monolith rose behind it, like a waking dinosaur. The behemoth’s coat of forest green undulated, dense and vast as a creature in its own right—a creature intent on driving the slender white snake of beach back into the ocean.

“There's no one there,” she said, struck by the confounding blend of beauty, humidity, and heat that seemed to emanate from the island.

“No seeums,” Shep quipped, but his heart wasn’t in it, either.

Claire gripped the bulwark, fighting a surge of nausea. His arm wound like a question mark around her waist. Who did they think they were fooling? Both of them, impostors.

Over the next six hours the shoreline remained relentlessly wild. They spotted a couple of isolated coastal villages, but even these looked deserted. Then a distant lighthouse blinked. Atop a bluff beyond, a regimental block of concrete rose, spiked with gleaming antennae.

“There.” Shep looked up from the gazetteer spread-eagled in his palm. Hope and relief cracked his voice as he pointed out Ross Island, their new home.

The hillock stretched like a long green breaker at the entrance to a harbor that abruptly bristled with boats. A mirage is how Claire will remember this first impression. A miniature replica of the world she thought she’d left behind. A dark gothic church with a soaring steeple. The semblance of a town square and parade ground. Victorian houses along the ridge, with gabled roofs and wide verandas, pale gingerbread trim. The colonial residents themselves were scarce, but small brown figures in white uniforms appeared and disappeared among the towering shade trees, multiplying at the southern end of the island, where the western architecture yielded to a dark brick scramble of shop houses and the humanity of a bazaar. The Hindu temple on the waterfront resembled a multicolored stack of Life Savers.

The Ross cantonment was the seat of British power for the entire Andaman archipelago, but to reach it, they had first to continue across the harbor to disembark on the “mainland,” where Port Blair proper stretched like a lizard's claw out of the forest’s interior. There, white-washed bungalows like those throughout India ranged along the slopes, and high on the lizard's outmost knuckle stood an imposing fortress with rose-colored crenellations.

“The Cellular Jail,” Shep said.

Claire gazed up at the pink castle walls. Inside—reputedly—the Raj’s most hardened convicts sweltered. By design, the whole port functioned as one vast concentration camp, but since the inmates’ dominant crime was their will to fight for independence, Claire felt far more disgust for their British overlords than she did any fear of the prisoners themselves. The anxiety playing across Shep’s face told her he’d been secretly dreading this inevitability as much as she’d been trying to ignore it. He was now working for those overlords, after all, and she was their subject by marriage.

 “It’s strangely picturesque,” she offered. “Maybe things won’t be so bad.”

Edition details

• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1597098892
• ISBN 13: 9781597098892
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 344