Leave it to veteran expat western author Dean Barrett to put a new twist on Asia-based fiction. His latest novel. A Love Story: The China Memoirs of Thomas Rowley (2013, ISBN-13: 978-0-9788888-3-1) will make readers want to hold on to their hats (and scrotums) as protagonist Thomas Rowley, a western soldier in China, is captured […]
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WoWasis book review: ‘Don’t Mean Nothing,’ Vietnam nursing experience by Susan O’Neill
Like many other veteran of the Vietnam war experience, Susan O’Neill, who served as an army operating nurse in 1969-1970, was angry enough when she returned that she simply wanted to forget it. Years later, she wrote about her experiences in fictionalized short stories in her Don’t Mean Nothing: Short Stories of Vietnam. (2001, ISBN […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: ‘Ying Yang Tattoo,’ Korea-based fiction by Ron McMillan
Probably because Thailand is such a draw for literary expats, there’s a dearth of well-written hard-boiled fiction situated in other Asian countries, Korea being no exception. For that reason, we here at WoWasis were particularly interested in Ron McMillan’s Yin Yang Tattoo (2010, ISBN 978-1-905207-31-2). McMillan’s not a veteran writer. It’s his second book, and […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: ‘Painted in the Tropics,’ the life of painter Theo Meier, by Harold Stephens
If you’re like us, you weren’t prepared to find that the Indonesia’s island of Bali hosted a number of extraordinary expat painters. Balinese museums and private collections are full of their work, and the viewer is left wanting to know more about these extraordinary artists. Noted expat Asian author Harold Stephens provides many important details […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: John Cadet’s ‘Occidental Adam, Oriental Eve’
If you’re fortunate enough to find one of John M. Cadet’s old books in a used bookstore, you’re in for a treat. His fiction, mostly centered in Thailand, is clearly about another time, although not necessarily a less innocent one. Occidental Adam, Oriental Eve (1981) is, like Venusberg Revisited (which WoWasis reviewed a while back), […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: ‘I-Boat Captain,’ by Zenji Orita with Joseph Harrington
We first became aware of Japanese submariner Zenji Orita in author Joseph D. Harrington’s book Yankee Samurai: the Secret Role of Nisei in America’s Pacific Victory (1979), which sent us scurrying to find Orita’s book I-Boat Captain: How Japanese Submarines Almost Defeated the U.S. Navy in the Pacific (1976). The book is alternately chilling and […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: Ron McMillan’s ‘Bangkok Cowboy’
Today’s review is guest-written by Iain Millar. I first met Ron McMillan in the bar at Aberdeen airport too many years ago when we were both en route to an assignment in further-north waters. Within minutes the pints were pulled, the pool balls were racked up and the tales were being spun. And if that […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: Stephen Leather’s ‘Hungry Ghost’ from Hong Kong
Stephen Leather never ceases to tantalize us. It’s not just the vicious murderers or the fetching murderesses, either. Hungry Ghost (ISBN 978-0-340-96072-1), originally published in 1992 and re-released in 2008, is replete with all the cerebral stuff we’ve grown to expect from the author. His “no stones unturned” approach is something we figure he picked […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: Haruki Murakami’s Japanese sci-fi novel ‘Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World’
In his sci-fi novel Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (2003, ISBN 978-0099-448-785), Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami weaves a cerebral tale of speculative fiction that explores the concept of parallel worlds. In one, a man finds himself tasked with reading the memories of previous residents of a walled town, by drawing out the […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: Kenzaburo Oé’s Japanese novel ‘A Silent Cry’
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Kenzaburo Oé’s novel A Silent Cry (1994) is a psychological thriller relating to the familial travails surrounding two brothers. As in much of the author’s writing, there are no heroes here, as all protagonists are enveloped by a deep-seated malaise that continues to descend as the book progresses. Oé is a master […]
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