Fiction

摘要

In 2001, on an evening with a full moon-when Asian folklore says a rabbit appears on the lunar surface-Amy Quan searches for a woman in Vietnam, "where I was born in the same year as her, our lives diametrically opposite." The woman, called Rabbit, was miraculously pulled from the grave of her dead mother on another full-moon night in 1972 and nourished long past infancy by a silent woman who will never nurse her own baby. Raised by two grandmothers and a sometime father and watched over by others, Rabbit encounters the "unnamed dead" in a country torn apart by centuries of domination and destruction. In. the aftermath of war, "the government was trying to create one memory, one country, one offi- cial version of what happened." From single deaths to mass graves, Rabbit reveals the "stories the world is eager to bring to light... [the] stories it doesn't want told." VERDICT Blurring boundaries between history and invention, life and death, even verse and prose, English professor (Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison) and multi-award-winning poet Barry's first novel is fierce, stunning, and devastating. Readers haunted by Kim Thuy's Ru, Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, and Tan Twan Eng's The Gift of Rain will revel in it. [See Prepub Alert, 8/4/14.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC.