Glorious Boy
Description
On a remote island in British India, a mute four-year-old and the local girl who cares for him disappear on the eve of Japanese occupation, forcing the boy's parents, a young anthropologist and her physician husband, to take drastic measures to save the children.
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About the Author
Aimee Liu is the bestselling author of the novels Flash House, Cloud Mountain, and Face and the memoirs Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders and Solitaire. Her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages, published as a Literary Guild Super Release, and serialized in Good Housekeeping. She's received a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, a Bosque Fiction Prize, and special mention by the Pushcart Prize. Her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, Poets & Writers, and many other periodicals and anthologies. A past president of the national literary organization PEN Center USA, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College and is on the faculty of Goddard College's MFA in Creative Writing Program at Port Townsend, WA. She lives in Los Angeles. More at aimeeliu.net
Reviews
An absolutely gorgeous historical novel about ambition, culture clash, love, atonement, and one silent boy, set against the backdrop of a tribe in the Andamans struggling with British rule. So blisteringly alive, you feel the swampy heat and the bugs; so emotionally true, it grips at every page. Just magnificent and not to be missed.
--Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You and Cruel Beautiful World
In Glorious Boy, Aimee Liu tears a forgotten footnote from the history books and brings it to life in an epic tale of a family caught in a clash of cultures and loyalties during World War II. Set in a penal colony on the remote Andaman Islands, Glorious Boy is the whirlwind story of vanishing cultures, unbreakable codes, rebellion, occupation, and colonization, all swirling around the disappearance of a mute four-year-old boy on the eve of the Japanese occupation of Port Blair. A stirring indictment of the brutality that humanity is capable of, Liu's heartbreaking new novel of love, betrayal, and sacrifice is also a testament to how far we will go for the ones we love.
--Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, author of Shadow Child and Hiroshima in the Morning
No doubt Aimee Liu's ambitious novel, Glorious Boy, will be praised, deservedly, as historical fiction, an adventure novel, even a ripping yarn, but the heart of this book is what it means to be a mother. Liu's sympathetic and complicated protagonist, Claire Durant, finds herself challenged when it comes to connecting with her atypical son, and the book asks us all to consider whose responsibility it is to be better with and to other human beings, especially those with whom we're most intimate. How do we learn what isn't instinct? How do we protect ourselves and others from our own best intentions? With a generous and exacting eye, Liu explores these questions and more, and we, lucky readers, get to go along for the ride.
--Karen Shepard, author of Kiss Me Someone
"A good choice for book groups and for readers who are unafraid to be swept away."--Starred Booklist review
Interviewed in Ms. Magazine
Listed as one of "12 Books That Will Take You on a Literary Vacation" from Brit+Co
A novel about family, communication, and colonialism in a rarely discussed sphere of World War II conflict.
--Kirkus Reviews
