Winner of the PEN/Faulkner award for fiction in 2003, The Caprices is a collection of stories artfully told across the theatre of the Pacific Campaign of World War II. An Anglo-Indian cavalryman, his homeland on the brink of revolution, finds himself in Malaysia fighting to protect British interests. Two soldiers lost in the jungle with a Japanese prisoner confront their prejudices toward each other, and the nature of being American. An island witnesses the passing of history from Magellan, to Amelia Earhart, to the dropping of the atomic bomb. With exquisite lyricism tempered by a journalist’s eye for detail, Murray shines light on the tangle of battles created by that conflict, the violent reach across the generations, the shattering reverberations in memory. With this collection, Sabina Murray established herself as a passionate and wise voice of literary fiction.

Review

With none of the nostalgia that mars so many books and movies about World War II, Sabina Murray's short story collection The Caprices covers the unfamiliar territory of the Pacific Campaign--Malaysia, the Philippines, New Guinea--and the all-too-familiar territory of human suffering. Most of Murray's characters are victims of circumstance. In the title story, a once-wealthy family lives in the shell of its grand house in Manila, guarding a demented young girl named Trinidad and trying not to attract the attention of the Japanese soldiers who have occupied the town. In "Order of Precedence," a young Indian officer in the British Army encounters his former commander at the prisoner-of-war camp where they have both been detained. Lieutenant Gillen is starving and diseased, but he will live; Major Berystede is dying. Once, in recognition of the younger man's polo skills, Berystede had proposed him for admission to the whites-only Officers Club. Now, through his parched lips, Berystede tells Gillen: "I finally found a club that would take us both." Though these nine stories are not linked, they can be read as variations on the theme of the unheroic reality of war. Brilliant and affecting, The Caprices merits comparison to The English Patient and, in a different vein but with a similar breadth of reach, David Mitchell's Ghostwritten. --Regina Marler

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