Nazneen, a young bride married at sixteen to a 40-year-old man, is wrenched from the only life she has ever known in the countryside of Bangladesh and conveyed to England, where her new husband, Chanu, has a job. Taught from the day of her birth that “fighting against one’s Fate can weaken the blood,” or even be fatal, she accepts the miserably lonely existence fate has bestowed on her in a London council flat. Though there are others from Bangladesh living there, Chanu believes the other immigrants to be uneducated, illiterate, and uncultured, and he discourages any reaching out Nazneen might do to these people who are “below” them. Author Ali shows Nazneen’s world in all its earthy details. Ali’s depiction of a woman’s coming of age through the process of acculturation is striking in its level of detail. Decisions which many of us take for granted assume new meanings when they are made by Nazneen.
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The waning days of the British Occupation of Cyprus were times filled with revolutionary zeal and guerilla attacks by Cypriots demanding independence. For the British, Cyprus represented one of the last colonies in the Empire, and they believed that its loss at the hands of “a few insurgents” would cause further damage to Britain’s waning international prestige. By January 1956, the British and the Cypriots were in their third year of a terrorist “Emergency.” Major Hal Treherne, a career soldier from a family of career soldiers, is assigned the job of patrolling villages in the south of Cyprus, conducting searches, and identifying suspects so that they can be turned over to the Special Investigations Branch for interrogation. This very readable, fast-paced narrative includes action scenes so vivid they sometimes resemble films. Hal’s life is one emergency after another, one battle after another, one moral quandary after another, and the reader quickly identifies with him in his emotional turmoil.
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When the Ibis, a “blackbirder” leaves Calcutta and sets out across the Bay of Bengal, carrying “indentured migrants,” many of whom will become the equivalent of slaves, the seas darken and become stormy. As the ship tosses and conditions deteriorate, the ship soon becomes a microcosm for life on land, full of tumult and unexpected twists of fate, and each person’s heart is laid bare. Everybody aboard is escaping from something, so anxious to put their problems behind them that they see no choice but to submit to the atrocious living conditions and sometimes sadistic overseers aboard the Ibis. Set in India in 1838, at the outset of the three-year Opium War between the British and the Chinese, this epic novel follows several characters from different levels of society, who become united through their personal lives aboard the ship and, more generally, through their connections to the opium and slave trades.
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Winner of the UK’s Whitbread Prize for Best Novel, the Orange Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Andrea Levy’s Small Island has just been released in the US, where it may win as many readers as it has “across the pond.” Set in London in 1948, it focuses on the diaspora of Jamaican immigrants, who, escaping economic hardship on their own “small island,” move to England, the Mother Country, for which the men have fought during World War II. Their reception is not the warm embrace that they have hoped for, nor are the opportunities for success as plentiful as they have dreamed. Alternating among four points of view, Levy involves the reader in their interconnected stories, which she tells with an honesty and vibrancy that make the tragicomedy of their lives both realistic and emotionally involving. (One of my Favorites for 2005)
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The land of Mesopotamia, in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, once boasted the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, among the Seven Wonders of the World. Highly developed ancient civilizations competed for power there, leaving behind sites of immense archaeological importance as they defeated each other and formed new civilizations. In the modern era, Mesopotamia, now known as Iraq, fell under a succession of foreign rulers, and by 1914, when this novel opens, it was ruled from Constantinople by the weakened Ottoman Empire. Virtually every country in Europe is on site, vying for oil. The Germans are building a railroad from Basra through Baghdad, an American from Standard Oil is there, the French are trying to gain a foothold so that the railroad will not take shipping business from them, and the Russians and the Austro-Hungarian Empire may help finance the railroad in exchange for a piece of the action. Trying to ignore most of this turmoil is John Somerville, a thirty-five-year-old archaeologist who has been working an ancient site near Baghdad. In the nonstop action, no one can trust anyone else. Unsworth creates a vibrant picture of a tumultuous time and place, endowing what might have been an exotic tale of archaeological discovery with a broader thematic scope.
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