Glorious Boy

March 9, 2020
Liu’s tense, evocative WWII family drama (after Flash House) explores the wartime turmoil for British colonials and indigenous people on the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. In 1936, Shep Durant, a British physician, and his American wife, Claire, a budding anthropologist, settle in the capital city of Port Blair, where Shep works as a civil surgeon. Claire, meanwhile, studies the islands’ indigenous peoples and takes an interest in Naila, the precocious eight-year-old daughter of her servants. After the Durants’s son, Ty, is born in 1937, they hire Naila as Ty’s nanny. Naila and Ty form a close bond that helps Ty communicate. At four, he remains mute, but Naila can intuit his thoughts. As Japanese troops advance on the Andamans in early 1942, British residents are ordered to evacuate, and Claire is shattered to learn that Naila, because she’s indigenous, is barred from accompanying them. Liu ratchets up the tension that culminates in Claire’s risky return to the islands in February 1943. With nuanced descriptions of diverse characters, and a wrenching portrait of the well-meaning Durants’ limited power, Liu upends the clichés of the white savior narrative. This sharp take on a lesser-known part of WWII history is worth a look. Agent: Richard Pine, Inkwell.

Starred review from May 1, 2020

Liu's eponymous "glorious boy" exists at the intersection of families, communities, countries, cultures--and, for a while, life and death. His spirited, adventurous parents--Shep, a British doctor obsessed with the healing power of indigenous plants, and the American Claire, a would-be anthropologist without an official degree--arrive in 1936 in the remote Andaman Islands in India's Bay of Bengal. Ty is born into their near-idyllic paradise, colonial as it is, and is beloved by all. But his closest attachment is to the servants' daughter Naila, who is eight years older. For his first four years, the silent Ty trusts only Naila to be his voice. By 1942, war threatens even the most remote shores and all (white) ex-pats are ordered to evacuate the islands. Hours before departure, Ty and Naila disappear, leaving Shep search after frantically thrusting a forcibly drugged Claire onto the final rescue ship bound for Calcutta. Reunion is the only goal that keeps Claire alive: Absolutely nothing--even code-breaking-and-creating and impossible reconnaissance (go, girl!)--will prevent her from finding her husband and son. VERDICT A riveting amalgam of history, family epic, anticolonial/antiwar treatise, cultural crossroads, and more, this latest from best-selling author Liu (Face) is a fascinating, irresistible marvel.--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2020
A novel about family, communication, and colonialism in a rarely discussed sphere of World War II conflict. On March 13, 1942, the Durants--Claire, an aspiring anthropologist, and Shep, a British civil surgeon--rush to prepare their exit from Port Blair, a British penal colony on the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, now under threat from Japanese forces. Claire and Shep pack up her field journals, arrowheads, and shell bowls collected from the native Biya and his medically useful plant specimens from their expeditions into the forest over the past five years. But the one thing they can't locate is their 4-year-old son, Ty. Mute since birth, Ty's strongest bond is with his Indian caretaker, Naila, a 13-year-old girl who understands his silent capriciousness better than his own mother. Shep, desperate to get his wife to stay on the ship to Calcutta and safety, drugs her and stays behind on the island to look for their son. He finds Ty almost immediately--he and Naila were napping in a banyan grove--but the family's separation decisively changes the course of each of its members' lives. As one of the few remaining British officials on the island, Shep is locked up by Japanese troops, but not before he sends Ty off into the forest with Naila and Leyo, a Biya family friend, to hide with the tribe. Claire, meanwhile, joins the war effort as a codebreaker, devising a code based on the Biya language for a mission that might just allow her to reunite her family. The plot is rollicking in pr�cis but much less gripping in execution, bogged down by an unmanageable amount of detail, the result of Liu's (editor: Restoring Our Bodies, Reclaiming Our Lives, 2011, etc.) obviously meticulous research: "Claire gets to work making her final tests of the TBX-8 transceiver pack, which will be her primary responsibility, and the SCR-536 mobile Handie-talkie that Ward will use for voice communication back to the TBX." At every turn, it seems, there's another islander or British government employee whose backstory is meant to lend emotional heft to the novel. The result is a book that feels scattershot--even the most theoretically wrenching moments don't quite land, and the reader comes away oddly unmoved by the entire cast. The profusion of narrative threads and historical detail doesn't quite add up to a well-told story.

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Starred review from May 1, 2020
In 1942, Claire Durant waits with her husband and young son for the all-clear to leave the Andaman Islands, where they've been stationed since 1938. The Andamans, east of India in the Bay of Bengal, are home to a colony of Burmese and Indian convicts as well as the native people, the Biya. Claire, a budding anthropologist, has been studying the Biya and getting to know them, but as WWII intensifies, she has no choice but to leave the people she loves. There is one other complication: Naila, their young servant, has a special relationship with Claire's son, Ty. And when Naila disappears with Ty, there's no telling what will happen to the family as they are wrenched apart. This fascinating novel examines the many dimensions of war, from the tragedy of loss to the unexpected relationships formed during conflict. The Andamans are a lush and unusual setting, a sacred home to all kinds of cultures and people, and Liu's (Flash House, 2003) prose is masterful. A good choice for book groups and for readers who are unafraid to be swept away.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)