Fate: The Lost Decades of Uncle Chow Tung by Ian Hamilton (Spiderline, House of Anansi Press)

When Ian Hamilton decided it was time for Uncle to depart from the Ava Lee series, apparently he missed Ava’s mentor as much as his mournful readers did. Uncle was a power behind the throne, influential, omnipresent, and subtle. Ava asks no questions about his past, although she knows from seeing his friends and employees that the man she cares most about in the world came from shadowy beginnings. And although Uncle is her mainstay throughout the first six volumes of her adventures, neither she nor Uncle ever reveal the details of when they first met.

Piece by piece, in six books, Uncle comes into focus: where he lives, what he eats, what he wears, along with his loyalty to those who work for him, and his paternal love for Ava. From the very first Ava Lee novel Uncle is old but his network of influence spreads far beyond his Hong Kong home and his mind can understand--and withstand--the most devious acts that any human is able to conceive. When at last he was removed from the series, even though he left a younger counterpart to stand with Ava, it was enough to bring at least one devoted fan to tears. 

Prequels are usually books that are picked up with a healthy degree of apprehension and it could be easy to dismiss Fate as an opportunistic spin-off. That would be a mistake. Uncle is as fascinating and dominant a character when given the spotlight as he once was as a presiding genius on the sidelines. His life is chronicled in three volumes: Fate (2019), Foresight (2020), and Fortune (2021), carrying him from his swim from Shenzhen to Hong Kong, an adventure that cost him the love of his life, up to his meeting with the woman who would become his partner and his daughter in every way but biological. Unfortunately only Fate is available in the U.S. at this time, perhaps because of covid-spawned difficulties in the world of publishing.

Chow Tung arrived in Hong Kong with little more than enough clothes to keep him from being naked.. Within ten years he’s become the White Paper Fan, the accountant, money manager, and administrator of legal and business matters, for a branch of The Heaven and Earth Society. Also called the Hung society, named after the Chinese character that showed the union between heaven, earth, and man, this organization had been in existence since the 1760’s within China until Mao chased it out of its country. Now in Hong Kong, it’s known as the triads and has become a major power in all parts of that region. In the town of Fanling, Chow Tung’s swift rise to a level of management has made him an integral part of that area’s triad and, through his financial acumen, he’s made his branch a leading player in Hong Kong’s vast underworld. Because of his remarkable maturity at a young age and his professional formality, his associates have begun calling him “Uncle,” and what was first a joke soon becomes the name that replaces Chow Tung for everyone.

When the Mountain Master, or leader,  of the Fanling triad dies in what seems to be a random hit and run, Uncle has doubts about the ability of the man slated to become the next chief. Calling for an election by secret ballot--one man, one vote as was always the traditional method--he begins a subtle campaign to elect a more qualified candidate. But politics is never a straightforward enterprise and Uncle becomes challenged by the twists and turns involved. When a neighboring triad senses weakness and moves in to take over, Uncle’s administrative skills are stretched to the limit. How much violence can be exerted upon the problem without beginning a fullscale war that will cause a crackdown by the Hong Kong police? Fortunately Uncle is a skilled user of the bonds forged by guanxi, and his web already is a wide one. But as he learns, guanxi can exact an unexpected price, one that even he is reluctant to assume.

Ian Hamilton has done his homework. Anyone who reads Fate is going to come away with an assortment of facts about the Triads, Hong Kong’s racetracks, and traditional funeral etiquette. Even a detailed description of chicken feet, how to cook them and how to eat them, is provided in succulent detail, and Hong Kong history comes into play with the appearance of a Saracen, the armed and armored vehicle that Hong Kong police once used in dangerous situations. 

However it’s always Uncle who keeps every page turning at a rapid rate, revealing the events that shaped him and brought him into power. Ava Lee is a hard act to follow but Uncle has proved to be more than equal to the challenge. May Foresight and Fortune show up soon on U.S. bookshelves!~Janet Brown

Monsoon by Di Morrissey (Macmillan)

Monsoon by Australian author Di Morrissey is the story of two women who grew up together and have ties to Vietnam. Sandy Donaldson has been working with an NGO for the last four years and her contract is about to expire, however, she doesn’t really want to leave the country she has come to love. She persuades her friend Anna, whose mother was a Vietnamese boat person, to come and explore her mother’s heritage. Anna is reluctant to leave Australia and feels she has no ties with the country as her mother died when she was a very young girl. 

Sandy has one other connection to Vietnam. Her father, Phil Donaldson is a veteran who served in the war and was at the Battle of Long Tan, a battle that took place at a rubber plantation in Phuoc Tuy province. The clash involved Australia’s D Company, 6th Battalion Royal Australian Regiment (6 RAR) seeing action against the Viet Cong and People’s Army of Vietnam. Phil Donaldson was a member of the 6th Battalion. He comes home a bitter man and resents the fact that his daughter is helping what he still considers “the enemy”. 

I wasn’t familiar with Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, so the Battle of Long Tan was a bit of a history lesson for me. I know I may get some flack for this as it’s sexist but I would classify this story as chick-lit. It is without a doubt aimed more towards women and the romance they may find in a foreign country. However, It is also a story about coming to terms with one’s identity. 

Sandy and Anna meet Tom Ahearn, a former war correspondent for an Australian newspaper. He was in Vietnam around the same time as Sandy’s father and may have interviewed him at a hospital that housed wounded soldiers who saw action at Long Tan. 

It has been forty years since the siege at Long Tan and the government of Australia is finally giving it the recognition the soldiers thought it deserved. A ceremony is to be held and many of the surviving veterans are planning to attend. Only one person is adamant about not attending - Phil Donaldson

Monsoon is a very moving story of people facing the ghosts of their past. Phil with the demons that haunt him. Anna, coming to terms with what it means to be Viet Kieu, a foreign-born Vietnamese, and finally there is Sandy’s relationship with her father who never speaks about the war, what he saw, or what happened to him. Most of the characters are people you can care about except for Anna’s boyfriend Carlo, who seems to be a two-dimensional model of an egotistical, narcissistic specimen of machismo that’s just a bit over the top. 

Monsoon blends present day Vietnam with the memories of war and the damage it has done to both people and country. The streets of Ho Chi Minh City and Saigon and other locales come to life with Morrissey’s vivid descriptions, as does the food and the atmosphere of each city, from the World Heritage designated Halong Bay in the north to the island of Phu Quoc in the south. It’s enough to make you want to visit the country yourself.~Ernie Hoyt

Shopping by Gavin Kramer (Fourth Estate)

Gavin Kramer is a British writer who was born in London, graduated from Cambridge University. Shopping is his first novel. In 1998, it was the last book to win the David Higham Prize, a literary prize which was established in 1975 and named after a literary agent. The prize was awarded to citizens of the Commonwealth, the Republic of Ireland, Pakistan, or South Africa for a first novel or book of short stories. It was canceled in 1999 due to "the lack of publicity its winners received."

Kramer set his story in the heart of Japan. The metropolis that’s called Tokyo in the mid to late nineties. The bubble has already burst but there are still three types of foreigners you can find in the country or so we are told by the narrator of the story who isn’t even the main character. That falls on Alistair Meadowlark, a British lawyer in his thirties who has accepted a two-year assignment in Japan with his firm. The narrator is Meadowlark’s colleague in the same office. 

Meadowlark’s colleague breaks down the category of young professional expatriates working in Tokyo. He does not include the other expats such as English conversation school teachers or students. He also discludes “the shaven-headed failures who fancied themselves to be Buddhists.” He also does not include the most-despised group of expats, “the slight dark-skinned men who worked on building sites and lived maybe a dozen to a room in the back streets of Shinjuku.”

Of the three categories of professional expatriates, Meadowlark’s colleague believes that Meadowlark belongs to the first group. The kind of person who is in the country not because they want to be but because their company sent them here. The type of person who constantly suffers from culture shock and longs to go home. 

The second type are the graduates of the first. Although they still feel out of place, many of the white men in suits take solace in dating or hooking up with local girls who find foreigners fascinating. They can usually be found wandering the night clubs and bars in Roppongi. 

Then there is the third, to which the narrator considers himself to be. The kind of expat who avoids places that most gaijin, the catch-all term for all foreigners, hang out. The kind of expat whom the narrator says, “We knew our tanzen from our yukata, Our Dazai from our Mishima, our udon from our soba.” So the narrator wasn’t surprised by Meadowlark’s assessment of living and working in Tokyo when he says, “There’s nothing to do here apart from work. Is there?”

But then we follow Meadowlark’s downward spiral as he meets Sachiko. A precocious sixteen-year old high school girl who’s very much into the latest fashions and brand names. Meadowlark becomes obsessed with her and boasts to the narrator that she is his girlfriend and he is more than happy to spend his hard-earned money on whatever she wants. He is in denial of the fact that is just another middle-aged man taking part in a social phenomena of the nineties called enjo-kosai which translates to “compensating dating”. 

Kramer brings to life the excesses of living in Tokyo in the mid to late nineties as seen through the eyes of someone who has actually lived there. He focuses a lot on what was happening during that nineties - the “subsidized dating” problem with minors, the tamagotchi fad which was a hand-held digital pet. Although the city and its environs are well-described, his characters are not flushed out quite so well. They remain two-dimensional which makes it hard for the reader to care about any of them. Still, if you plan on living and working in Japan, this story could provide you with some insight as to what to expect. ~Ernie Hoyt

Around India in 80 Trains by Monisha Rajesh (Nicholas Brealey Publishers, Hachette UK)

“London had never looked so grey,” as it did on the day Monisha Rajesh decides to travel through India by train--on 80 of them, in honor of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. More than 20 million passengers travel that way in India every day, along routes that stretch for 64,000 kilometres, so she figures her dream is possible. 

Rajesh’s parents both came to England from India as doctors. “Two children and fifteen years later,” her family tried to resettle in Madras but when her father discovered that the hospital he worked in did a flourishing business in selling the hearts of dead patients, he decided this wasn’t a place where he wanted his children to grow up. That two-year stint was all Rajesh had experienced of India. Now she prudently decides that if she’s going to explore the country the way she plans, she needs a traveling companion and settles on a young Norwegian photographer who (for reasons of discretion) she refers to as Passepartout (the name Verne gave Phileas Fogg’s comrade in the 80-day journey).

Although they miss their first train in Chennai, Rajesh has an uncle who assures her “Leave it to me, my dear,” and finds them seats on what she calls The Insomnia Express. This is only the first of many sleepless nights enhanced by snores from neighboring bunks and itchy blankets that come in a paper bag wrapping. Passepartout quickly discovers the black coffee that he requires every morning is hard to come by in the land of chai and makes the mistake of cooling a prized cup of his favorite brew with a dribble of tap water. Rajesh learns that her basic Hindi leaves her prey to questions of whether she and her comrade are married and why her father allows her to travel as she does. “To be honest, “ she says, “the only place where I feel like a foreigner is in India,” where she’s immediately pegged as an NRI, non-resident Indian.

Part of that foreign identity is probably because she’s traveling with Passepartout. When a bitter skirmish over Indian temples and belief causes them to go in separate directions, Rajesh becomes accepted by her fellow passengers and the solitary journey she feared is essentially nonexistent. “On the rare occasions you find yourself alone in India, it is never for long.” In a compartment with three strange men for 28 hours, by the time the first meal appears, it’s “like eating with family.” “You haven’t eaten very much,” the men chide her in tones reminiscent of her mother, “By Indian standards, you are very underweight.”

By the end of her four-month journey of 40,000 kilometers on 80 trains, (all listed at the beginning of her book), she disembarks at her starting point, back in Chennai, and happily allows the crowd “to sweep me into its embrace.”

Rajesh’s crisply written descriptions range from the unsparing to the lyrical. From the “worst hotel in India,” which gives a new dimension to squalor, to the grand luxury of the Indian Maharajah-Deccan Odyssey, “a five-star cruise on wheels” that whisks passengers through India at night like “a luxury Tardis,” her experiences are recounted in a lively and humorous fashion that never falters. Whether she wakes to find a hand groping her, which she circumvents by swiftly changing bunks with Passepartout, gleefully imagining that hand fondling “a tired and grumpy Norwegian” or hears the familiar voices of her best friend’s Cambridge parents soon after she begins her first solitary train trip in tears, Rajesh takes it all in stride. 

Her conversations with strangers are illuminating and delightful, even when a man tells her without rancor that she’s a very selfish person, adding “Why are you caring if I am telling such a thing,” and then presents her with a translation of the Bhagavad-Gita. Another one scolds her, “You have traveled on 64 trains and you still don’t know how to make a bed.” After doing that for her in the proper fashion, he gives her a tutorial on the meaning of the numbers painted on each car that gives the age of the carriage. “It was like learning a secret handshake.”

India comes alive under her skillful writing--rain that’s “the kind that lacerates human skin” and mixes “mud and stone into a paste of Rocky Road ice cream,” “halos of light from candles in doorways,” a train that looks like a “metallic version of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, “mynahs muttering quietly to themselves as the sky took on an eerie orange glow” at dusk. 

Rajesh is the perfect traveling companion. Even if it’s impossible to accompany her while eating chicken lollipops, drinking Thums Up, and discussing the palanquin carriers’ strike, buying an IndRail pass and carrying her book as a guide seem to be the only sane response to this absorbing work of travel literature. Reaching its end prompts the sentiment voiced by a New Delhi ticket agent, “Oh God…where are you going now?” To discover the answer, a quest for Rajesh’s Around the World in 80 Trains is the next step--I can’t wait to find it and go off with her on another journey.~Janet Brown 

Ava Lee: The Triad Years : A Series by Ian Hamilton (House of Anansi Press)

Ava Lee isn’t the kind of woman to work her way up a corporate ladder, although her skill as a forensic accountant would guarantee a swift ascent.  Her university degree has given her a marketable career but she’s more devoted to the practice of bak mei, a subtle and deadly form of martial arts that’s taught her how to kill with one of her knuckles. 

While working at a Canadian firm, Ava meets an elderly man from Hong Kong whom everyone calls Uncle. Impressed by her accounting talents, he offers her the chance to join forces with him as a “debt collector.” 

As humble as this sounds,the work actually involves the recovery of missing money--and lots of it. Uncle is only interested in jobs that involve sums of at least twenty million dollars US and his fee is 30% of what’s recovered, which in one case brought him one-third of 80 million dollars. His background is shadowy and the people he employs are rough around the edges. He needs Ava’s beauty and professional polish to get the jobs that will be most lucrative, and Ava is drawn to the variety and challenge of the work that Uncle can provide.

A deep affinity begins to take root between the septuagenarian who once swam from the coast of China to begin a new life in Hong Kong and the young Chinese Canadian woman who has a comfortable existence in Toronto but welcomes difficult jobs that come with a threat of danger. Uncle discovers that Ava can hold her own against the burliest goons that are brought to bear against her and Ava finds a smart and kindly mentor whom her distant father has failed to be. 

A woman with her own style, Ava begins each job dressed in crisp Brooks Brothers shirts, black linen slacks or pencil skirts, and conservative black pumps, enlivened by jade cufflinks, a simple gold chain that holds a small crucifix, a Cartier Tank Francaise watch, and the ivory chignon pin that has become her good luck charm. These details are far from trivial. The clothes aren’t just a uniform,  they’re armor, in good taste with a dash of luxury, but unobtrusive. When Ava’s dressed for work, nobody can guess that she’s also dressed to kill, professionally and literally. Small and slender, Ava is easily underestimated and she uses this as one of her primary weapons.

Uncle finds the jobs, through contacts from a subterranean life that Ava never asks about. She’s the one who’s the public face of their enterprise, who can gain entry to the highest levels of any world she needs to access, but who can also render an assailant helpless with one quick and strategically placed blow. Men hold no menace for Ava, nor any attraction either. She prefers women.

Her adventures become addictive and luckily there are many of them, recounted in fourteen books to date, beginning with The Water Rat of Wanchai and most recently found in The Diamond Queen of Singapore. The earliest volumes slowly unveil the world of Hong Kong’s triads, complete with a flow chart of their structure. Within that framework are detailed looks at the business of art forgery, the gambling worlds of Las Vegas and Macau, international money laundering, and the complexities of the seafood industry.  All of these settings involve sums of money that are almost unimaginably huge, a whole lot of violence, and a staggering amount of travel. Ava Lee books first class air tickets the way other people jump on a city bus. 

Hong Kong, Metro Manila, Surabaya, London, Shanghai, Las Vegas--wherever she goes, Ava’s destinations, along with the meals she has when she gets there, are described in mouthwatering detail, giving Lonely Planet guides a run for their money. A walk though one of those cities is charted carefully enough that any reader could follow in Ava’s footsteps and reach her destination--and because Ian Hamilton is such a good writer, many of them are going to want to do that.

Hamilton became an author after a long and varied career in over thirty different countries, with positions ranging from journalist to Canadian consul to international businessman whose specialty was runnning seafood companies. Obviously his journalism training in taking notes has served him well as a novelist but his talent goes way beyond that of a painstaking observer. His novels abound in descriptions that are both witty and evocative. “He looked like a garden gnome in a suit,” is the way he introduces one of his most repulsive characters and he pinpoints the prevailing odor of Southeast Asia with “The air was humid, thick with the smell of cooking oil, rotting vegetation, exhaust fumes, and garbage.” (Mmmm, I can smell it now.)

“People always do the right thing for the wrong reason,” Uncle frequently reminds Ava. It’s certainly true when it comes to this series. One book picked up to kill time in an airport is going to take the reader on a multi-volumed literary rollercoaster ride, one that’s going to give them more pleasure (and information) than they ever expected to find. Enlaced within Ava’s adventures are facts: the splendor of Surabaya’s Majapahit Hotel (“better than Raffles”), how long it takes for flunitrazepam to kick in (popularly known as roofies), who the Ndrangheta are and where they come from, the delights to be found in the Arab quarter in of Surabaya,  which kretek (Indonesian clove cigarettes) are the most expensive and the best,  the importance of an Italian collar on a well-made shirt--and all of that in a single book (The Scottish Banker of  Surabaya. Perhaps none of these tidbits are essential to know, but they open new windows into unknown corners, and that’s indisputably essential.

However these books come with a caveat. Anyone who ventures into Ava Lee’s territory will probably end up with her primary addiction--cups of Starbucks Via Instant Coffee. While her preferences for Cartier, Shanghai Tang, and five-star hotels may be out of reach for most of us, Via can be found all over the world at prices anybody can afford. Prepare to succumb to the inevitable. ~Janet Brown

The 13th House by Adam Zameenzad (Fourth Estate)

“Traditionally The Twelve Houses of the Zodiac are called mundane houses because they refer to every day life on earth activities.”

“Not much is said about The Thirteenth House”.

The 13th House is narrated by an unnamed person in the beginning. As the story progresses, we learn the narrator is someone close to Zahid. The narrator is the son of the man Zahid’s father worked for and embezzled from. It is the narrator who makes the story flow as he describes Zahid’s descent into his own private hell. We also learn the complicated story of the narrator as he also becomes a victim of the “Thirteenth House”.

As the narrator explains it, the Thirteenth House is “the house of perpetual pain and therefore no pain; the house of perpetual darkness and therefore no darkness; the house of perpetual despair and therefore no despair.”

So begins Adam Zameenzad’s story of a man named Zahid who has suffered much in life. He doesn’t understand his wife Jamila, he lost his first two sons at an early age, he is trod upon by his employer, and the political situation in Pakistan where he now resides is not one of peace and harmony. 

Zahid has two other children - a seven-year old daughter named Azra and a four-year old son who is not named in the novel and doesn’t seem to be quite normal. His parents had already passed away. He remembers his father as a kind and gentle man but ran away from home with a woman of “ill-repute” and was also discovered to have embezzled money from his employer. His mother was a hard-worker bringing up five children on her own and “would slap him each time he asked for anything, and advised him in a hard, grating voice to go and get it from his good-for-nothing thief of a father, wherever he was.” 

Zahid feels that his luck is about to change. He has found a new home to rent in a nice neighborhood in Karachi. A larger house than the room he currently lives in with his wife and two children. The joys of moving into a larger home and at a bargain price. So what if there are ‘stories’ about the house. What could go wrong? In Japan, this house would be considered a wake ari bukken which is a “discounted property due to special circumstances”, a stigmatized property.

Zahid was not bothered by what people said about the house. It took him a little while to convince his wife that it was the right thing to do for the family. She reluctantly gives into his wishes even though she believes the house contains some evil power.

What happens in the house is enough to make anyone believe that it is “evil”. A good friend is shot by the police in the home, Zahid’s wife is seduced by some religious guru, and most shocking of all, is what happens to the narrator and Zahid himself. 

This is Adam Zameenzad’s first novel. He is a Pakistani-born British writer. He was born and educated in Pakistan, lived in Kenya, Canada, and the U.S. before moving to the U.K. He has created a novel that makes you think of the absurdities of life and how people blame it on superstitions and other supernatural suppositions. It is you, the reader, to decide, was it just bad luck and misfortune that fell upon Zahid or did he bring it upon himself as an unwitting pawn in the circle of life. ~Ernie Hoyt

Hiromix Works (Rockin' On)

Hiromix is the pseudonym for Hiromi Toshikawa who was born in Tokyo’s Suginami Ward in 1976. She is a multi-talented individual who is mainly known for being a Japanese photographer.  She is also a writer, DJ, model, artist, and musician.

As a high school student, Hiromix took part in being a hishatai (a subject for photography, not to be confused with being a model), for Nobuyoshi Araki. At the shoot, she met Araki’s then assistant Takashi Homma, who has become a famous photographer in his own right. It was Araki and Homma who inspired her to take pictures on her own.

In 1995, she won the New Cosmos of Photography Award, an award sponsored by Canon. The youngest person to do so. The award was established in 1991 and is “Canon’s cultural support project to discover, nurture, and support new photographers pursuing new possibilities in creative photographic expression”. Hiromix was nominated by world-renowned Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki for her series of pictures titled Seventeen Girl Days which depicts life from a teen’s point of view. 

After winning the award, Hiromix has gone on to publish nine books of photography between the years of 1995 and 2005. She became known outside of Japan with the publication of her book Hiromix by Steidl in 1998 which was edited by French photography critic Patric Remy. She also won Germany’s Kodak Photo Prize in the same year. 

Hiromix Works is a collection of her full-color photographs taken between the years 1995 and 1999. Her subjects range from musicians to models, actors to artists and illustrators. All the pictures are candid shots and have a very casual feel to them. Some of the featured subjects have become known in the West as well such as actor Tadanobu Asano and designer Nigo, creator of fashion brand A Bathing Ape. Other photos are of ordinary everyday items such as a rack of bowling balls, pizza, a school bag, a shelf full of masks and more. 

Hiromix could be looked upon as the Annie Leibovitz of the East as her pictures are often used in music and fashion magazines such as Rockin’ On Japan, Men’s Non-No, Cosmopolitan, and Cutie to name a few. Her works also feature international recording artists such as The Beastie Boys, Marilyn Manson, Sean Lennon, and Skunk Anansie. 

Being an amateur photographer myself, there was a time when I was hooked on buying photography and coffee table books by a variety of photographers. I had picked up Hiromix Works shortly after its publication but only recognized a few faces. All the others were like Japanese citizens to me. 

After living in Japan for well over twenty-five years, I decided to revisit Hiromix Works to see how her pictures stand up today. I am glad to say they are great now just as they were when this book was first published. On a more positive side, I now recognize almost all of the subjects of her pictures including Hiromix’s self-portraits. 

I still enjoy taking pictures but I’m not confident enough to make them public. I admire people who pursue their dreams and become successful. Hats off to Hiromix and others! ~Ernie Hoyt

Mother Land by Leah Franqui (HarperCollins)

When Rachel Meyer opens the door of her apartment, she expects to find the vegetable seller, bringing produce and a bout of linguistic frustration.  Instead she sees her husband’s mother with a suitcase, waiting to enter and stay, and she knows disaster has arrived.

Newly married to a Kolkata man who has chosen to return to India, Rachel is a New York woman who’s thoroughly befuddled by Mumbai. Her Hindi phrasebook is almost useless because the people she interacts with speak Marathi. When she ventures out to buy food in the local market, she’s assailed with embarrassment and incompetence. When she goes out to explore the city, she’s faced with inexplicable chaos on every sidewalk. Her apartment is her only refuge and now that’s been invaded by a woman she barely knows, one who says she’s left her own home and intends to stay forever.

Floundering in a new country that baffles her, Rachel has ceded all decisions to her husband but this is too much. Suddenly the culture that’s thoroughly shocked her is in her bedroom, taking over, and her husband is acquiescent. After all, this is his mother and this is India. Blithely he takes off on an extended business trip, leaving Rachel with a problem that’s apparently her own.

Sometimes all that’s expected of a book is comfortable entertainment. Mother Land is the perfect antidote to winter’s darkness and the mind-boggling, apocalyptic speculative fiction of The Three-Body Problem trilogy. While it would be unfair to characterize the story of Rachel and her mother-in-law as chick lit; it’s definitely a warm-bath book, with a delightful twist at its end. Yet it’s more than that. It’s an insightful examination of culture shock in different forms--Rachel’s, her mother-in-law’s, and that of other Mumbai transplants with varying nationalities.  

Leah Franqui knows her fictional territory. Her home is Mumbai where she, like Rachel, is  married to a man from Kolkata. A self-proclaimed Puerto Rican-Jewish Philadelphia native and Yale graduate, she undoubtedly endured much of what Rachel suffers, but, as Franqui makes clear in her acknowledgments, without the intrusive mother-in-law. Her life in Mumbai gives depth and richness to Rachel’s, making this novel an illuminating, realistic, and occasionally satirical view of expat life in that city.

Rachel makes the classic rookie mistake by withdrawing from her new city and taking refuge in a world she can control, within her own apartment. Outside she spends “long afternoons, lost, aching with heat,” discovering that “the business she was trying to find had moved, or she had passed it twelve times, or that it had never existed at all.” “The crushing, bustling masses” and the cacophony of horns, bicycle bells, and cries from vendors that assail her on the streets lead her to conclude that New York “was a ghost town compared to Mumbai.” She stays home and amuses herself by cooking, until her privacy is invaded by the culture she’s hiding from.

As Rachel is forced out of her sanctuary, her tolerance for noise and crowds increases. At one of those ubiquitous gatherings of expat wives, the kind that lapses swiftly into criticisms of “them” as opposed to “us,” Rachel’s back goes up and her perspective takes on a new cast. Gradually she and her mother-in-law both begin to examine the concept of “home,” with startling results.

Anyone who has ever lived in another country, or who’s dreamed of doing that, needs to read Mother Land. While its setting is specific and stunningly descriptive, its stumbling blocks go beyond India’s boundaries. Entertaining? By all means, but it also provides a realistic guide to expat life anywhere in the world while presenting smart and seductive insights into one of the world’s great cities. ~Janet Brown