by Tan Twan Eng (Tan)
Phillip Hutton was sixteen in 1939, when his father and siblings left him home alone in their affluent home on the Malayan island of Penang. Since his Chinese mother had died when he was young, he always felt different from his English father and siblings, and he welcomed the feeling of belonging when he became friends with his Japanese diplomat neighbor, HayatoEndo-san, a master and sensei of aikido. The novel begins when 72-year-old Phillip is visited by a woman from Endo-san’s past who inquires about him, thus most of the novel is a brutal flashback from during World War II. Phillip tried to do the right thing while tangled within conflicting loyalties to his family, his country, his ancestry, and his friend. I lived inside the book for the two weeks it took me to read it, utterly gripped within the beautiful writing and terrified by the horrors of war it described. This book is epic and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. The author’s other book, The Garden of Evening Mists, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Tan Twan Eng is a Malaysian novelist known for being the first Malaysian recipient of the Man Asian Literary Prize, the first Malaysian novelist to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and the first Malaysian author to win the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.
[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Garden of Evening Mists, also by Tan Twan Eng.]
[ Wikipedia page for The Gift of Rain ] | [ official Tan Twan Eng web site ]
Recommended
by Jodi R.
Anderson and Bethany Branch Libraries
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