Michael Kaan

It appears I am the first person on LT to write a review and rate this book. I hope I am just the start of a growing trend. This debut novel exhibits none of the usual faults and the story it tells is intense. I think it will be one of my top reads of 2018.

Chung-Man Leung was born to a wealthy family in Hong Kong before World War II. His two oldest brothers were adults when the war started but Chung-Man, his brother Leuk and his sister Mai-Ling were still young. Their father had died a few years before the war and the two oldest were running the family enterprises. When the Japanese invaded Hong Kong it was decided that the three youngest should go to a relative in mainland China while the mother and the two oldest stayed behind. One of the sons was married and his wife accompanied the three children. Even before the children left Hong Kong they experienced hardship and witnessed brutality but that was just a prelude to what they would experience later. Eventually the children and their sister-in-law were captured by the Japanese and put into a prison camp. Food was scarce, hygiene was problematical and the women were subject to sexual attacks by the Japanese soldiers. When the small family was moved to another camp with no fence the small group split up with the females leaving first. Chung-Man and Leuk stayed behind hoping the Japanese soldiers would not notice the girls' absence. The war was going badly for the Japanese at this point and they were becoming more brutal towards the prisoners. We know that Chung-Man survived because his memories of this time are interspersed with discussions of his life in America after the war. However we don't know until the end what happened to the rest of his family and it would spoil the intensity of the story if I disclosed it here.

I remember learning in high school English that one of the great themes of literature is man's inhumanity to man. This book is certainly in that tradition but that theme is leavened by instances of people showing kindness in the face of that inhumanity. The author used his father's memoirs of the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong for the basic fabric of the book so it is clear that there is much truth in the story. There is certainly much to contemplate here. Small wonder that this book won the 2018 Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the 2018 McNally Robinson Book of the Year and the 2018 Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction.… (meer)