LITERARY FICTION

RELATED ARTICLES
Previous

1
Next

SPOOKY CHILDREN'S LITERARY FICTION
Share this article
Share LAND OF THE LIVING by Georgina Harding (Bloomsbury �16.99, 240 pp)

LAND OF THE LIVING

by Georgina Harding (Bloomsbury �16.99, 240 pp)

Charlie has returned home from the war barely able to tell his new wife, Claire, about the dreadful things he has witnessed in India and Burma, during which time he spent months recovering from a fever in the care of the head-hunting Naga tribes.

The reader can barely discern them, either - the truth of his experiences, private myanmar tour including the loss of Charlie�s comrades in a Japanese ambush, is revealed only very slowly, myanmar tour via a series of flashbacks and through Charlie�s own accounts to Claire, which have the hallucinatory, unstable quality of a memory that resists being fully retrieved.

Claire, meanwhile, cooks in their Norfolk farmhouse and waits patiently for her husband to come home properly.

It is a pity that Charlie and Claire never really emerge as fully fleshed characters from beneath Harding�s lyricism, which has something of the oppressive stillness and humidity of the jungle itself. But there is a dignity to the story she tells that feels both remarkable and rare.






SILENCE IS MY MOTHER TONGUE by Sulaiman Addonia (Indigo �12.99, 288 pp)

SILENCE IS MY MOTHER TONGUE

by Sulaiman Addonia (Indigo �12.99, 288 pp)

Addonia spent several years as a child in a Sudanese refugee camp and you can sense the impact of that period on his richly written second novel, which brims with the sensory flavours of remembered experience.

Saba, newly arrived at an East African refugee camp with her mother and myanmar tour packages mute brother, has had her dreams of university cut short. Instead, she can only look at the patch of grass earmarked for a new school and pester aid workers about when it might be built.

Meanwhile, a local businessman in the camp has struck up a possibly exploitative relationship with Saba�s brother.

Written in a fragmented style, this novel is very much concerned with female sexual desire and the male gaze and the way the gap between the two is made particularly dangerous in a refugee camp.

I found Addonia�s more poetic stylings too artful, but this is a sobering reminder of the way war brutally circumscribes the shape of women�s lives.