Melissa Fu’s accomplished first novel, PEACH BLOSSOM SPRING (Little, Brown, 385 pp., $28), documents Henry’s diligent attempts to put down roots in New Mexico, but its strength lies in its portrayal of the many places - Changsha, Chongqing, Shanghai and points in between - where his mother, Meilin, sought refuge with her only child, known then as Renshu.Īlong the way, Meilin tries to comfort little Renshu with tales inspired by an antique scroll, the only item of value she could salvage after her husband’s death. It’s no surprise, then, that he bristles whenever his daughter asks for stories about her grandmother in Taiwan, who struggled to survive on the mainland during the Japanese invasion and the Communist takeover that followed. After earning a place at a Midwestern university, he marries an American, takes an engineering job and determines to become a new man. In contrast, Henry Dao does everything in his power to forget the world of his youth in China. Like his neighbor Shakuntala, the half-caste Indian widow of a British bureaucrat, he must maneuver “between so many worlds.” Yet he’s also capable of defiant acts of bravery.

The grandson of a prisoner deported from Burma and the son of a father deranged by medical experiments, he works for the British and even assists in force-feeding hunger strikers. Nomi’s teenage friend Aye is a perfect example. But most of the compromised yet deeply sympathetic inhabitants of South Andaman Island have a single aim: to live for one more day. What was the “terrible mistake” that sent Nomi’s father from India to this brutal labor camp along with his innocent wife and children? Did the lone female political prisoner really manage to escape, as rumor has it? Will the invading Japanese Army, with its “Asia for Asians” propaganda, yield an occupation that’s any less vicious for the people of the archipelago than that of the Raj?Ĭlandestine spies abound, as well as some obvious villains.

Set in the Andaman Islands, a British penal colony in the Bay of Bengal, just before and during World War II, Khan’s suspenseful, thought-provoking narrative is a challenge to simple assumptions about enemies and friends, loyalty and betrayal. Uzma Aslam Khan’s THE MIRACULOUS TRUE HISTORY OF NOMI ALI (Deep Vellum, 370 pp., $26.95) is indeed a miraculous performance, although the young girl called Nomi Ali is only one of the many characters whose histories are entangled here. Here are a dozen new books that succeed, in a satisfying variety of ways, in doing just that. Much more than an imaginary escape into bygone times, the best examples can reveal how people and places have changed (or not), letting us see the concerns of our fractious present through the prism of the past.

I like to define historical fiction in generous terms.

Peach blossom spring review