The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan (Simon & Schuster)

Cecily Alcantara knows precisely what the blessings of colonization are. In British-ruled Malaya she chafes under them every day. She’s Eurasian, “nearly  white, like them,” her mother often told Cecily when she was growing up. Cecily knows better. She comes in contact with “them” frequently and none of “them” see her as nearly white. 

Married to Gordon Alcantara, a Malay bureaucrat who has a low-ranking position with the local British administrator, Cecily frequently and reluctantly accompanies her husband to government social functions where she’s snubbed by Englishwomen. She’s an easy target for a Japanese spy who has come to their town under the guise of a Hong Kong businessman.

Bingley Tan is actually Shigeru Fujiwara, a man who will eventually become a general in the Japanese Army,  the Tiger of Malaya. He insinuates himself into Cecily’s household by befriending Gordon, visiting his house, plying him with whisky, and helping Cecily put her husband to bed after Gordon passes out. 

Quickly discovering Cecily’s resentment of the British overlords, Fujiwara lures her with thoughts of Malya governed by Malyans after the colonial powers vanquished by the Japanese Imperial Army. Japan, he tells her, will bring this about but for this to happen he needs the help of patriots like herself. 

And help is what Cecily provides. Her life shimmers with new excitement as she purloins official papers from her husband’s study, eavesdrops on conversations he has with his superiors, has clandestine meetings with Fujiwara, and tucks information in secret hiding places for her spymaster to recover later. 

When the Japanese Army invades Malaya and routs the British troops who had expected them to launch a naval attack, not a march overland from Thailand, Cecily is overjoyed. But then matters go badly awry. The occupying Japanese aren’t eager to relinquish Malaya to the Malays. Instead they exert a brutal form of control that becomes terrorism.

Families hide their young daughters when Japanese soldiers enter their homes. Then the young boys begin to disappear. One of them is Cecily’s son. What she first thought was an act of heroism performed for the good of her country, Cecily realizes was a betrayal that demands her children as sacrifices.

Little is known in the West about the effects of the Japanese occupation of Southeast and much of the fraction that’s told focuses on the plight of British prisoners of war. Vanessa Chan turns a scathing lens upon the Asian prisoners who were slave laborers and were forced to build the Burma Railway that was immortalized by the movie, The Bridge on the River Kwai. She vividly and terribly reveals the conditions of the “comfort stations,” put into place so Japanese soldiers wouldn’t reenact the horrors that took place in Nanjing, a collection of shacks where the “comforters” were barely out of childhood. She reveals what it was to live under a military occupation, in a state of constant fear and hunger.

Chan grew up in Malaysia with grandparents who had lived through the years between 1941-1945. “In Malaysia,” she says, “our grandparents love us by not speaking,” specifically not speaking about life under the Japanese Imperial Army. When Chan asked her grandmother, who had been a teenager in those days, what her life was like at that time, she received the reply “Normal. Same as anyone.”

Slowly Chan’s questions received answers, fragmented details of her grandmother’s life during World War II. From these fragments, Chan began to construct her novel, one that is emotionally difficult to read but is so skillfully told that it’s impossible to set aside. The Storm We Made is her first novel. Let’s hope that it won’t be her last.~Janet Brown

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng (Bloomsbury Publishing)

W. Somerset Maugham was a writer with a talent that verged on the vampiric. Taking advantage of the human “urge to confess,” he kept a travel notebook filled with “anecdotes and character sketches [that can be] smelted and hammered into stories.” In the early part of the 20th century, he journeyed through the Straits Settlements of Malaya and Singapore, having adventures, sucking up stories, and feasting upon secrets. The book that resulted from this journey, The Casuarina Tree, made him a pariah among the British community of the Straits but Maugham was unlikely to care. He was obsessed with keeping his own secret, hiding behind an unhappy marriage to conceal his homosexuality. 

The House of Doors fictionalizes his time on the island of Penang, placing him as a houseguest in the home of a friend from his youth. Cassowary House is named after a casuarina tree in the garden, a corruption of the Malay word, kasuari. The tree, Maugham’s hostess, Lesley,  tells him, is believed to be a “whispering tree” that can tell the future if it’s approached in respectful silence. Maugham can relate to that, although the whispers he yearns to hear are ones that tell stories from the past or, even better, the present..

He’s not the first famous visitor to Penang. Herman Hesse beat him to it by thirteen years and more recently the Chinese revolutionary, Dr. Sun Yat Sen, came to garner financial support from the local Hokkein Chinese. Dr. Sun spent a great deal of time at Cassowary House and when Lesley speaks of him, she does with a mixture of reserve and suppressed emotion that intrigues Maugham. Convinced that she betrayed her husband with the charismatic doctor, Maugham divulges a secret of his own and embarks on a series of late night conversations with his hostess, after her husband has gone to bed. What he is told provides a generous portion of his next book, with one startling omission--startling only because he chooses to maintain silence, out of respect for his old friend and the woman with whom he’s developed a deeper friendship.

In The House of Doors, Tan Twan Eng matches the master of literary larceny. Within the framework of a doomed clandestine love affair, Eng inserts some of the tales told in The Casuarina Tree into his own novel. Some are fragments of the stories Maugham purloined: the wife who runs away from her wealthy husband without leaving an explanatory note, the uncovered affair that demolishes a marriage, and the tidal bore that sweeps its way up a river and sends the occupants of a boat into deadly water. But the story that carries a substantial part of Eng’s novel is one of Maugham’s most famous, The Letter, that later became a movie of the same name. It recounts the true-life tale of  a notorious Singapore scandal in which an English wife killed a man whom she said had tried to attack her in a nocturnal encounter. She was put on trial, was found guilty., and served time in a Singapore prison.

Eng takes that piece of history and embroiders upon it, turning it into a surprising subplot to the stories Maugham discovers about his hosts in Penang, upon whom Eng has bestowed the first names of the ill-fated husband and wife in The Letter. As Lesley divulges the intricate details of the victimized woman who once was her friend, her own revelations receive a kind of dispensation from a man who finds no shame in his violation of other confidences. 

Although Eng takes Maugham’s stories and folds them into his own, there’s nothing predatory about this hijacking. It’s done with the spirit of homage while Maugham is given a full measure of respect and tenderness, with at least one unforgettable moment of humanity and communion in a sea gleaming with phosphorescence. 

But it’s Lesley who dominates this novel, a woman who has known no other home but the island on which she was born. Through her eyes, we see Penang in its full beauty, its “trees gauzed in mist,” a seaport where “seabirds dipped and wheeled above the swamp of riggings and swaying masts,” where “labrynthine streets sold a bewildering variety of goods”and where at sundown “the world faded to monochrome.” 

As he did in his debut of The Gift of Rain ( reviewed in Asia by the Book in April, 2008), Eng makes Penang and its colorful, tumultuous history irresistible. He overlaps his first novel with this most recent one, with the father of Philip Hutton, the boy whose story is told in the first, making memorable cameo appearances in The House of Doors. Both of these novels have been longlisted for the Booker Prize, an honor that Eng would well deserve--and I’m certain that Somerset Maugham would agree with me.~Janet Brown

The Last Resort: A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit and Peril by Sarah Stodola (HarperCollins)

Blame it on the British. Stuck on their soggy little island with its chilly shoreline, bordered by a sea that could induce hypothermia if an intrepid adventurer immersed so much as a single toe into its frigid waves, once they learned that a beach could be pleasant, there was no stopping them. The south of France, the coast of Italy, even England’s sworn foe, Spain, were suddenly prime targets for English bodies yearning to be warm. Time spent on a beach became the fashion for cold and restless residents of northern countries until at last the words “vacation” and “beach” became almost synonymous, first only for the wealthy and then for the masses. Today there are over 7000 beach resorts on our planet, not including the ones that have fewer than ten rooms or aren’t directly on the beach.

When the invention of the air conditioner tamed the “soupy heat” of the tropics, new destinations opened up for the world’s sun-worshippers. First came the readers of Lonely Planet guides, followed by people with more money to spend and were reluctant to relinquish the comfort they were used to. Beach shacks were supplanted by more comfortable accommodations, built for the travelers who wanted to be “far from home while never having left.”  Local residents soon realized that their beaches yielded more money than any of their agricultural efforts and suddenly resorts studded coastlines all over the world.

Sarah Stodola, like many other tourists, became enthralled with the concept of a beach vacation when she went to Southeast Asia. Although she surveys seaside destinations from the Jersey Shore to Senegal, the bulk of her explorations take place in tropical Asia. This is where the idea of the resort ranges from rustic bungalows for surfers to entire islands that only the wealthy can afford, where the cheapest accommodations begin at $2,200 a night. 

People will pay for solitude. Some pay with the discomfort of discovering an undeveloped paradise while others yearn for “barefoot luxury,” “peace without challenges,” and a “frictionless experience.” Asia has both extremes and everything in between the two. It also holds the largest number of potential tourists. Before the advent of Covid, in 2018 150 million Chinese tourists traveled outside their borders, enriching the tourist industry with $255 billion dollars in 2019. China,” Stodola speculates, “has the power to remake the global tourism industry” with India as a close contender.

Chinese travelers are already changing the beaches of Vietnam, their “fourth-most-visited destination, after Thailand, Japan, and South Korea, with 4 million Chinese descending upon this small country in 2017. Most of them flock to Vietnam’s two thousand miles of coastline, where, a developer says, “you see a new resort opening every three months.” The perils of over-development have been slowed by Covid but the signs are clearly there. Dams have prevented the replenishment of beach sand while illegal sand mining takes place offshore with impunity. It’s a small indication of how the ravenous appetite for beach holidays are endangering the coastlines of the world.

An island in Malaysia points the way that disaster could be averted. One locally-run NGO is making recycling an island-wide practice. A machine that cost only $6000 takes empty beer bottles and turns them into sand. This is mixed with concrete and used in the island’s construction projects, eliminating the need to import expensive sand from outside the island and making illegal sand mining from the sea an irrelevant operation. With thousands of beer bottles emptied constantly by tourists, this is a vastly sustainable solution.

Others are less palatable and more difficult to bring into being. With a world full of paradise-seekers who are accustomed to jumping on planes to get what they want, how to stuff that genie back in the bottle by discouraging long-haul flights? Maybe by making beach holidays what they were at their very beginning, a privilege reserved for the wealthy.~Janet Brown

The Rice Mother by Rani Manicka (Sceptre)

The Rice Mother is the debut novel by Malaysian born writer Rani Manicka. It is the multi-generational story of one family. All beginning with Lakshimi, the matriarch to six children, three grandchildren, and a great-grandchild. It is a story of love and loss, betrayal and deceit, and also of remorse and redemption. 

Lakshmi was born in 1916 in Ceylon, present day Sri Lanka..At the age of fourteen, Lakshmi is married off to a wealthy man named Ayah who has a job in Malaya. The man was much older than her and also a widower with two children. Unknown to Lakshmi or her mother, they were deceived by the man’s mother. Lakshmi discovers that he was not the wealthy businessman as described before getting married but with no option of returning home, Lakshmi decides to make the best of her life in this new land. 

Lakshmi has six children. The eldest are the twins Lakshmnan and Mohini. Lakshmnan was everything Lakshmi could hope for in a boy but it was Mohini that she was most taken with. She gave birth to the most beautiful girl the heavens could provide her with. After the twins came Anna, the strong and reliable daughter, followed by Sevenese who became enamored with his neighbor, the snake-charmer’s son. Sevenese also realized that the snake-charmer’s son was in love with his sister Mohini. The youngest was Lalita, everyone’s favorite. 

Life was mostly peaceful and grand. Then the Japanese came and for the three years of the Japanese Occupation, the Imperial Army committed a number of atrocities that the citizens would not soon forget. The most devastating blow to the family was the kidnapping and killing of their daughter Mohini. This act will change the life of all the members of the family. 

Lakshmi becomes inconsolable and turns into a cruel and nearly intolerable presence. Lakshmnan blames himself for his sister’s capture and loses himself to loose women and gambling even though he is married and has three children. Ayah was also taken by the Imperial Japanese Army and tortured and left for dead but survives and is only a shadow of his former self.

Of Lakshmnan and Rani’s three children, Dimple was the spitting image of Mohini. For Dimple, this was more of a curse than a blessing. Dimple decides to make a “dream trail” by asking and taping everyone in her family to tell their stories so she could understand herself. It isn’t until Dimple’s daughter Nisha grows up and is bequeathed a key from her father that will unlock the secrets of her past. 

I can’t imagine the suffering of losing a loved one during a time of war and how that death will affect everyone surrounding them, but even if the story is fictional, it can make your own family problems seem trivial in comparison. 

Manicka’s beautiful prose of this family epic sometimes reads as an ongoing storyline of an American soap opera such as Days of Our Lives or One Life to Live, not that that’s a bad thing. She writes in such a way that will have the reader gain an understanding to light the customs and manners of Tamil and Malay culture. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Consul's File by Paul Theroux (Washington Square Press)

When people see or hear the name Paul Theroux, it most likely brings up images of a well-traveled man who goes on journeys and writes about his experiences. It is his travel essays where he found most of his success. His first major success was the account of his journey from Great Britain to Japan and back. The book was titled The Great Railway Bazaar and has become a classic of the travel genre. However, Theroux is a prolific writer of fiction as well. 

The Consul’s File which was published in 1977 is a collection of stories set in the fictional town of Ayer Hitam in Malaysia. The unnamed narrator is the American consul sent to the town as the United States still had an interest in the rubber estates. However, the rubber trees were being replaced by oil palms and many of the Americans had already left. It was the narrator’s job to phase out the consulate. 

We are told, “In other places the consular task was, in the State Department phrase, bridge-building; In Ayer-Hitam I was dismantling a bridge.” The narrator tells us that he was told that all he needs to know are all written in files kept in a small box-room at the Residence. He decides to write and add his own stories and stories he heard which he knows to be true to the files for posterity. 

The narrator’s secretary told him about the files so one day, the consul takes a day off and spends it at the Residence where he decides to open the box-room. There was a mystery surrounding files holding who knows what kind of secrets. What he does find is a stack of yellow papers bounded by string and partially eaten by termites. It didn’t take him long to discover “that there was little writing on them, and certainly no secrets; in fact, most of the pages were blank”.

The Consul spends two years in Ayer-Hitam and deals with a variety of people who either need his help or ask favors of him. One of the most annoying characters is a woman writer named Margaret Harbottle. She is the epitome of the entitled white American when the term wasn’t even in fashion yet. She bursts into his office as soon as it opens, she makes all sorts of demands before the Consul can even sit down. She believes it’s the Consul who should make her feel comfortable as she says she will give his name a mention in her forthcoming book. 

There is the woman anthropologist who reminds you of Conrad’s Kurtz as she goes native and marries an aboriginal chief. The woman who claims to have been raped by some oily man only to be told by one of his helpers, the person responsible was Orang Minyak, orang meaning man and minyak which means “oily, like ghee butter on his body”. He also tells the consul that Orang Minyak is a Malay spirit that only bothers women at night. 

The twenty intertwined stories gives you a feel of what it must have been like to work as a diplomat in a third world country in one of its outermost posts. The characters, both and foreign and domestic, are brought to life by Theroux’s wit and observance. It’s a shame that there are still American citizens who act like the writer who expects everything to be done for her. Visitors to other countries must remember that they are the guests and shouldn’t be making any demands just because of their nationality. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Crocodile Fury by Beth Yahp (Angus & Robertson)

The Crocodile Fury is Beth Yahp’s first novel and is set in her native Malaysia. It is the story of three generations of women - the grandmother who was a bonded-servant to a rich man and worked at his mansion before it was converted into a convent, the mother who works in the convent’s laundry room, and the girl who narrates the story. 

The narrator has spent most of her life in the convent. “The convent is on a hill on the edge of the city, next to a jungle reserve which swallows and spits out trucks full of soldiers every day.” This is where the narrator begins her story. She also talks about the tribe of monkeys led by a one-armed bandit who often leads raids into the kitchen of the convent to steal food. 

It is the convent where the parents of the wealthy and the poor send their girls. “Young girls are brought in who are too noisy or boisterous or too bossy or unladylike or too disobedient or worldly, or merely too hard to look at, or feed.” The homely girls are taught to sew and weave while the noisy, boisterous girls are taught to become honest, obedient and humble young ladies. 

The narrator is a charity student. The narrator was raised mostly by her grandmother. She tells us that her grandmother believes in ghosts and demons.  “She is old now, so sometimes she mixes them up. When she was younger she had an extra eye.” When the narrator asks her grandmother, “Where? Where?” Her grandmother tells her she can never be sure. Her grandmother’s extra eye “suddenly opened when she was hit on the head with a frying-pan ladle.” This gave her the power to see the demons and spirits and the ability to talk to the dead. 

Yahp’s prose flows smoothly and is a delight to read as she makes the jungle surrounding the convent come alive but the story itself goes all over the place. At times, it is very difficult to follow as the narrator will talk about her grandmother, then her mother, then about herself and back to her mother or grandmother making it hard to follow the chronology of events. It is also difficult to feel any empathy towards the characters. 

The grandmother comes off as demanding and unforgiving. The narrator with her repetitious pronouncements about her mother “before she was a Christian” was irritating at best. In fact, all the characters seem to be caricatures of people as none of them are given any names. They are only known as grandmother, mother, the bully, the rich man, the lover, the lizard boy and so on. 

The story is told with a blend of spiritualism, mysticism and the mundane so you can never be sure if the narrator is telling a true story or is just remembering a dream she had or a vision her grandmother saw. 

And the “crocodile fury”? The crocodile is a metaphor for man and his hunger to satisfy his lust for power and love. The fury is when the “crocodiles” cannot contain their own anger. All in all, the descriptive depiction of the convent and the characters that pass through there make for a story that is at once confusing and beautiful at the same time. ~Ernie Hoyt

Into the Heart of Borneo by Redmond O'Hanlon (Vintage Departures)

Two middle-aged British academics embarking upon a journey up a jungle river on the island of Borneo--what could possibly go wrong?  After all, Redmond O’Hanlon has a relative who once trained men in the art of jungle warfare and his chosen travel companion, the poet James Fenton, spent time in Cambodia, Vietnam, South Korea, and the Philippines as a journalist. Armed with an impressive library of natural history and poetry, a survival kit supplied by the British Special Air Services, and a rather terrifying amount of information given by the Major in Charge of SAS Training, Fenton and O’Hanlon fly off in search of the rare two-tusked Borneo rhinoceros, while carefully observing all avian wildlife that might come their way. 

“I want permission to go up the Baleh to its headwaters and then to climb Mount Tiban,” O’Hanlon announces to a skeptical Malaysian bureaucrat, “James Fenton and I wish to re-discover the Borneo rhinoceros.” Somehow they manage to gain the necessary permits and the guiding services of three Iban, members of a jungle tribe who were once famed for their skill in headhunting and who have never been to the area that they will help their charges to reach.

Spending their days in a boat and their nights in campsites on the riverbanks, O’Hanlon and Fenton swiftly learn that they are comic relief for their companions. The Englishmen come with flyfishing gear that is inferior to the harpoons of the Iban, they are rapidly laid low by the arak that their guides can drink by the quart with few ill effects, and are less than charmed by the steady diet of rice, bony river fish, and meat from an occasional turtle or lizard. Elephant ants and leeches are plentiful; every morning the novice explorers coat themselves with SAS anti-fungal powder, and Fenton comes close to drowning in the whirlpool of a waterfall. All of this provides rich amusement to the Iban, who are delighted to offer their new friends as entertainment to the jungle tribes they encounter along the way. Yet the exploration party all develop an understanding and respect for each other that ripens into true friendship.

Underpinning a wildly funny narrative of Oxford men struggling through Borneo is a stunning naturalist’s view of tropical wilderness and its fauna, with an underpinning of accounts from past explorers. Gibbons, langurs, kingfishers, and eagles are marvels that make up for the agonizing discomforts of jungle travel. And although the elusive Borneo rhinoceros never makes an appearance, O’Hanlon ends his quest by meeting one of the men who have caused that animal to become a rare and miraculous sight.

Not just a diverting travel narrative, Into the Heart of Borneo gives a poignant look at a way of life that is already beginning to vanish in 1983, as timber interests discover the jungle. O’Hanlon’s journey could never be replicated today. Below the wit and charm of his story lurks a bitter sadness that surfaces when it’s read in this century. The world he found and learned to love is rapidly disappearing, if not destroyed. ~Janet Brown

Evening Is the Whole Day by Preeta Samarasan (Houghton Mifflin)

If there is one thing that literature has taught us, from Anna Karenina to The Corrections, it's that unhappy families are as much alike as happy families are. But while happy families are bound together by congenial mealtimes, festive holidays, and shared affection, unhappy families are linked by lies, unspoken secrets, and every conceivable kind of abuse.

This is the familiar territory that forms the terrain of Preeta Samarasan's first novel. A marriage founders, the children learn that whatever love comes their way will have to come from each other, a grandmother dies, an accusation is made, and a scapegoat's life is destroyed. From the first page, the story is obscured by things untold, which seem both deeply sad and sadly ordinary when disclosed at the novel's end. Yet what raises this book above the usual dysfunctional drama, what makes it rich and textured and darkly funny, is its setting and its surrounding community.

The crowd of characters that fill these pages wouldn't be out of place in the works of Dickens, while the titles of the chapters pay clear homage to that master of English prose. And the author tells us, "It is obvious how sharply parts of this land must have reminded the old British rulers of their faraway country."

But the "grey mist, glowing green hills" and "the violent silver ropes" of rain are in Malaysia, and the people who give the story such dazzling life are Indian, Chinese, and Malay. Some of them are ghosts.

The lonely and brilliant baby of the family, six-year-old Aasha, is the only one who can see the spectres, but there are many things that only Aasha sees and only partially understands. Her adored older sister has abandoned her, in spite of all she has done to prevent this, in spite of the huge and terrible lie that she has told to keep Uma, and Uma's mysteriously removed love, at home with her. Slowly and gradually, as bits and pieces of family history fall into place, it becomes plain why Aasha's heart has "cracked and cried out in protest."

As the jigsaw of tragedy comes together, so do unforgettable, wildly original characters, who would be minor if they weren't so indelibly drawn. Kooky Rooky, the neighboring kept woman, whose origins change each time she chooses to divulge them; Mrs. Surgeon Daisy Jeganathan, the social-climbing gossip with the "late-night, bridge-party laugh"; the dimwitted Anand who "cannot quite count to twenty" but is possessed by the spirit of his dead five-year-old sister once a year and becomes a celebrity prophet who speaks in a child's voice. None of these people are likable, yet they are instantly real and weirdly lovable.

The most real and the most lovable entity is Malaysia. An avowed wanderer and expat, Preeta Samarasan evokes her homeland vividly--its odors, its streetfood, its sun "liquid as an egg yolk", its "bloody ballet" of history, its "flourishing, mixed-up, polyglot" character shaped by its various ethnicities--and without it, this book would verge upon soap-opera territory. With it, it verges on a book that Charles Dickens would envy.

The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng (Weinsten Books)

Philip Hutton, half Chinese, half British, is caught between two powerful cultures and two dynamic families while feeling as though he belongs to neither. Told by a fortuneteller that he "was born with the gift of rain," the element that exists in the space between sky and earth and carries with it both life and destruction, he knows that is his own natural state--caught in the middle without a place that is truly welcoming--until a Japanese stranger enters his life.

Endo-san is a master of the martial art of aikijutsu, and Philip becomes his student. The harmony and balance of the practice, with its discipline over both body and mind, begins to provide a bridge between the divergent halves of Philip's life,while the friendship and guidance of Endo-san give him the attention that he has never known that he has missed. Slowly the resolution between the mental and the physical that he has learned in aikjutsu begins to permeate other parts of Philip's life, and the disparate elements of his mingled heritage start to cohere for him. Then the war begins, the Japanese invade Malaysia, the British abandon the country, and the world as Philip knows it falls into pieces. With the realization that his family is endangered and that his closest friend is an integral part of the invading forces, Philip begins to make choices that brand him as a traitor, lead to the death of people he loves, and haunt him for the rest of his life.

If it simply offered a passport to a time that has disappeared and a glimpse of the horror and the heroism that are spawned by war, The Gift of Rain does this so well that it would still be an unforgettable piece of fiction. Yet that is only part of what this book does. The Malaysian island of Penang, a piece of the world that both Philip's British and Chinese families are rooted to, is given a central place in this novel and is described in such powerful, evocative detail that it claims the heart of the reader as completely as it does Philip's. From the mouthwatering array of food on its streets, to the amazing diversity of its neighborhoods, to the magnificence of its prewar houses, to the sound of rain dripping from its trees, it is generously and wonderfully given form throughout the book.

So are the complexities of love in its many guises, the mystery of looking at someone never seen before with complete recognition, the question of past lives, and the torment of free will with its attendant curse of choice. Memory and loss, age and acceptance, duty and longing, these threads in the fabric of Philip Hutton's life are examined with such intelligence and grace that they transform this novel without ever threatening to overwhelm its story. This is the mark of a writer to watch; this is The Gift of Rain.