"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
"The most memorable and original novel I've read in ages. Aimee Liu takes us into a set of islands—an entire world—most of us have barely heard of, and evokes every side in a multi-cultural conversation with sympathy and rare understanding. Here is the rare book, full of heart yet rich with research, that opens a door to a revealing piece of history that few of us knew existed."—Pico Iyer
"A novel about family, communication, and colonialism in a rarely discussed sphere of World War II conflict." —Kirkus Reviews
"A good choice for book groups and for readers who are unafraid to be swept away."—Starred Booklist review
"Reminiscent of the tone and atmosphere of Somerset Maugham and George Orwell’s Asia-set novels, Glorious Boy is a Second World War story of adventure and loss, uniquely set in the Andaman Islands, one of India’s farthest flung territories....Glorious Boy stands out from the crowded shelves of World War II literature by immersing the reader in one of the remoter theatres of the Asian half of the War."—Susan Blumberg-Kason, Asian Review of Books
"...the thrilling story of one unstoppable mother on a quest to be reunited with her family.”—Madeline Diamond, Travel+Leisure "20 New Books to Gift This Mother's Day"
"As WWII intensifies, anthropologist Claire Durant waits with her family for the all-clear to leave the lush and sacred Andaman Islands, in this fascinating novel about the many, often unexpected dimensions of war." —Booklist, "Top 10 Historical Fiction of 2020"
"Glorious Boy transcends history and geography and gets to the heart of things."
—Elizabeth Sulis Kim, The Los Angeles Review of Books
"This lyrical narrative takes the reader on a sweeping emotional and physical journey, exploring themes of endurance, love, sacrifice, motherhood, guilt, and hope." —Susan McDuffie, Historical Novel Society
"Glorious Boy is an exciting read, a family story that morphs into a high-stakes adventure." —The Washington Independent Review of Books
"Liu's well-crafted plotline shows how courageous action brings hope. In lushly described scenes, Glorious Boy engages the reader while not providing the characters any easy paths to resolution." — Consequence Magazine
"This novel tugged at my heart in all the right ways. I got teary explaining to my husband why I’d cried the night before, when I’d stayed up until two in the morning finishing the book. As her characters’ journey becomes increasingly fraught, Liu walks the emotional tightrope perfectly, never swaying into sentimentality but also never shying away from heartbreak." —Norah Vawter, Washington Independent Review of Books
★ 05/01/2020
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
2020-02-10
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 précis 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.
