Thrillers on the Nile and China, and Women in Modern China: Sunday Salon

Latest read

Havoc by Christopher Bollen  Publication: December 3, 2024; Harper, NetGalley

Genre: suspense literary fiction, noir mystery, Egypt 

My review:

Eighty-something year old Maggie returns to the Hotel Karnak on the banks of the Nile to live out the rest of her life, but then meets an unlikely eight-year-old, Otto, a guest with his mother at the hotel, who gets in the way of her lifestyle and unusual hobby. Maggie is a self-made love arbitrator who has decided on the sly to interfere in couples' lives and engineer their break up when she thinks someone in the marriage is or will be unhappy.

Otto has witnessed Maggie at work, when he sees her leaving false trails that led to the break up of a family in the hotel. He decides to play cat and mouse with Maggie throughout the book and is diabolical in getting back at her when she doesn't give in to his blackmail for video games and expensive items for his mother.

A dark tale of warring minds, old versus young, both getting ever more desperate, until the two seem to go off track. It was hard to believe that an eight year old could be so diabolical, but then I'm reminded this is fiction and Maggie is equally wicked. The last page of the book left me wondering if Otto intended such an ending. The Egyptian god of disorder, violence, and foreigners in Egypt, Set, who is mentioned in the book, seems to reign over these two opponents.

It was an engrossing noir read, leaving the reader wondering during the book, what craziness will they have in store for each other next? 

 

At the library

A modern day spy thriller 

  

The Expat: A Novel by Hansen Shi ( Pegasus Crime, July 2, 2024)  

Description: Piercingly intelligent and ruthlessly contemporary, The Expat: A Novel is both a white-knuckle spy novel and a thrilling exploration of the myth of meritocracy, high-tech immigration, U.S.-China conflicts, identity, and disaffection. 

Princeton graduate, Michael Wang finds himself enmeshed in a dangerous web of industrial espionage and counterintelligence when he goes to China for an engineering job in the auto industry. Caught between two countries that view him as a pawn, where do his loyalties lie? (publisher)

Young women in China trying to make it in the new economy

 

Private Revolutions: Four Women Face China's New Social Order by Yuan Yang 

Published July 2, 2024, Viking

Genre: women's history, nonfiction, Communism and socialism

Description: A sweeping yet intimate portrait of modern China told through the lives of four ordinary women striving for a better future in a highly unequal society

While serving as the deputy Beijing bureau chief of the Financial Times, Chinese-British journalist Yuan Yang began to notice common threads in the lives of her Chinese peers—women born during China’s turn toward capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, who, despite the country's enormous economic gains during their lifetimes, were coming up against deeply entrenched barriers as they sought to achieve financial stability.

The book traces the journey of four such women as they try to make better lives for themselves and their families in the new Chinese economy. 

 

What new books or programs are you reading/watching this week? 

Memes:  The Sunday Post hosted by The Caffeinated Bookreviewer. Also, It's Monday: What Are You Reading, Sunday Salon, and Stacking the Shelves 

 

Note: I am an Amazon Affiliate and will earn a small commission with each purchase through blog links, at no extra cost to you. Thanks for your support.

Sunday Salon: Books Set in Asia

Welcome to the Sunday Salon.

I was really happy to receive two surprise books yesterday, thanks to the publishers, both novels set in India.

The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken: A Vish Puri Mystery by Tarquin Hall will be released July 10, 2012 by Simon and Schuster. It's a mystery novel set in New Delhi. I've read The Case of the Missing Servant, the first in the series, and really enjoyed the main character, India's P.I. Vish Puri.

I received the ARC of Jana Bibi's Excellent Fortunes by Betsy Woodman, the first in a planned series of books featuring Jana Bibi, her chatty parrot, and her housekeeper, living in Hamara Nagar, India. The book will be released July 17, 2012 by Henry Holt.

I'm in the middle of reading
Mingmei Yip's Skeleton Women, a novel set in early 1930s Shanghai,
finished The Headmaster's Wager by Vincent Lam, set in the Vietnam during the Vietnam War, and
finished The Fear Artist (A Poke Rafferty Thriller) by Timothy Hallinan, a thriller set in Bangkok.

I plan to write reviews of the above three but may not post two of them till their release dates in the U.S! These books are going to take some thinking to review; they are pretty complex, with complex settings, and complex situations and characters. But I think I'll enjoy doing it.

What's on your plate for the next couple of weeks?

Found Books: The Opium War

Title: The Opium War by Julia Lovell
Hardcover: 352 pages; Kindle 
Publisher: Picador; First Edition edition (2011)

The full title is The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams, and the Making of China and I found it while browsing on the web. The impact of the early 19th Century war when China was forced to open trade to the west and import opium into the country is examined by the author to determine its effect on the China of today. I'd love to get my hands on this book; it seems the book may be critical of the present Chinese government for being too skeptical of Western countries today!

The Opium War reminded of another new book, an historical novel that also covers the Opium War, Amitav Ghosh's River of Smoke,  the title probably referring to the smoke from the smoking of opium.

Title: River of Smoke: A Novel by Amitav Ghosh
Hardcover: 528 pages; audio and Kindle  
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (September 27, 2011)

Publisher's book description: "The Ibis, loaded to its gunwales with a cargo of indentured servants, is in the grip of a cyclone in the Bay of Bengal; among the dozens flailing for survival are Neel, the pampered rajah who has been convicted of embezzlement; Paulette, the French orphan masquerading as a deck-hand; and Deeti, the widowed poppy grower fleeing her homeland with her lover, Kalua.

The storm also threatens the clipper ship Anahita, groaning with the largest consignment of opium ever to leave India for Canton. And the Redruth, a nursery ship, carries Frederick “Fitcher” Penrose, a horticulturist determined to track down the priceless treasures of China that are hidden in plain sight: its plants that have the power to heal, or beautify, or intoxicate. All will converge in Canton’s Fanqui-town, or Foreign Enclave: a tumultuous world unto itself where civilizations clash and sometimes fuse. It is a powder keg awaiting a spark to ignite the Opium Wars.

Spectacular coincidences, startling reversals of fortune, and tender love stories abound. But this is much more than an irresistible page-turner. The blind quest for money, the primacy of the drug trade, the concealment of base impulses behind the rhetoric of freedom: in River of Smoke the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries converge, and the result is a consuming historical novel with powerful contemporary resonance."

We listened to River of Smoke, the second in the Ibis Trilogy, on a long trip to Canada, but had to return it to the library before finishing it. Unfortunately, we may have to wait on another trip to hear the other half of the audio! The weaving of personal stories with history is compelling, though, and a major plus in this trilogy.

Book Review: Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh

Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
Genre: Historical fiction
Paperback, 530 pages
Published May 1st 2008 by John Murray (first published 2008)
Source: Library
Rating: 4 of 5

Comments: My husband listened eagerly to the entire audio book version. That's a pretty good endorsement. He was somewhat disappointed though by the ending, as there were loose ends not tied up. He felt the author didn't quite know what to do with all the myriad characters he created in this awesome historical drama. He'll be glad to know that Sea of Poppies is only the first in the Ibis trilogy, and that the story is not over.

I was intrigued by the myriad accents put on by the eBook reader, Phil Gigante, and by the pidgin and Anglo-Indian words used in 19th century India. Gigante's voice versatility gave color and immediacy to the reading of the novel.

Goodreads book description: "At the heart of this vibrant saga is a vast ship, the Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean; its purpose, to fight China’s vicious nineteenth-century Opium Wars. As for the crew, they are a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts.

In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt raja to a widowed tribeswoman, from a mulatto American freedman to a free-spirited French orphan. As their old family ties are washed away, they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais, or ship-brothers. An unlikely dynasty is born, which will span continents, races, and generations.

The vast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, the exotic backstreets of China. But it is the panorama of characters, whose diaspora encapsulates the vexed colonial history of the East itself, that makes Sea of Poppies so breathtakingly alive -- a masterpiece from one of the world’s finest novelists."

The novel  is a Man Booker Prize nominee (2008).

© Harvee Lau 2011