The Great Reclamation
'Every page pulses with mud and magic' Miranda Cowley Heller
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- 3,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
'An extraordinary achievement . . . Every page pulses with mud and magic'
Miranda Cowley Heller, author of The Paper Palace
'A monumental epic . . . I was spellbound'
Nathan Harris, author of The Sweetness of Water
'Ah Boon's story will stay with me for a long time'
Lara Prescott, author of The Secrets We Kept
'Alive to the beauty and mystery of the natural world as well as the human heart'
Jessamine Chan, author of The School for Good Mothers
They would look back and ask themselves, what was the moment that changed everything? Could she blame him? Could he blame her?
Ah Boon is born into a fishing village amid the heat and beauty of twentieth-century coastal Singapore, in the waning years of British rule. As he grows up, alongside Siok Mei, the spirited girl he has fallen in love with, he finds himself caught in the tragic sweep of Singapore's history. When the Japanese army invades, the resistance rises, and their small nation hurtles towards rebirth, the two friends must decide who they want to become - and what they are willing to give up.
A powerful coming-of-age of both a young boy and a country, The Great Reclamation asks what might happen when the love between two children complicates the fate of an entire community and country, literally shifting the land beneath people's feet.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Heng (Suicide Club) charts the course of Singapore's independence through the story of a child who makes a fateful discovery. In 1941, seven-year-old Lee Ah Boon finds a cluster of islands hitherto unknown to the fishing village he lives in. Over the difficult years of Japanese occupation during WWII and the postwar period of self-governance under British rule, the mysterious islands prove to be an abundant source of fish. Then, local government officials, colloquially known as the Gah Men, propose a land reclamation project to build new housing. The landfill that results threatens the islands and the livelihood of the villagers, and it presents Boon with a difficult decision as a young man—should he defend his old life as a fisherman or fall in with the anticommunist Gah Men in the march toward progress? Heng wrings a great deal of emotion from Boon's experiences and relationships, notably a childhood friend who becomes a leftist and resists the Gah Men, and articulates the individual sacrifices and the inevitable divides that arise in nation building, skillfully capturing the inner psyche of a Singaporean everyman caught between two immovable worlds. This epic undertaking is not to be missed.
