Sunday Salon: Historical Novels and a Review

A new arrival this week, thanks to River Books Press is The Stairway Guide's Daughter by John Burgess, published September 25, 2017. The book is an historical novel set in the Angkor civilization of 12th century Cambodia. 

Description: "...a young woman called Jorani earns her living guiding pilgrims up a two thousand-step stairway to the magnificent cliff-top temple, Preah Vihear. One day, she accidentally witnesses the furtive burning of sacred palm-leaf documents, and is drawn into a succession struggle at the temple. She is forced to choose between loyalty to family and to the son of the abbot, with whom she forms an unlikely bond."

Another book I was excited about is by the new Nobel Prize winner in Literature this year, Kazuo Ishiguro.

I found my 2007 Goodreads review of When We Were Orphans. I reread it recently and got a few more ideas. Here is the original review:

"A book I have wanted to look at again. Set in the 1930s, it's about a young English detective with a faulty memory who returns to wartime Shanghai in 1937 to find his parents who had disappeared there years ago when he was about nine years old. As he is an unreliable narrator, readers have to figure out the puzzle of his past and become detectives themselves to decide what is fact and what is fiction. Christopher meets a Japanese soldier in Shanghai who may or may not be his playmate from years ago, before the war. How Christopher reacts or doesn't react to him and how he ignores his surroundings in Shanghai during the Japanese invasion is part of his strange, delusional persona. This book intrigued me so much, I want to try again to get the hard facts of Christopher's journey, which may not be possible, given his inaccurate memory. Ishiguro, born in Nagasaki, Japan and now living in London, is also author of The Remains of the Day, a Booker Prize-winning novel made into the award winning film with Anthony Hopkins." I'll just add now that on reading it again the past two days, I found the narrator Christopher to be a kind of English/European version of the Ugly American, representing the tunnel vision that ignored the reality of what was going on in Shanghai before and during WWII. If anyone has read  When We Were Orphans, I would love to discuss it and get your ideas here. What have you been reading this week?

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