Redigerar LITERARY FICTION

RELATED ARTICLES<br>Previous<br><br>1<br>Next<br><br>SPOOKY CHILDREN'S   LITERARY FICTION<br>Share this article<br>Share LAND OF THE LIVING by Georgina Harding (Bloomsbury �16.99, 240 pp)<br><br>LAND OF THE LIVING<br><br>by Georgina Harding (Bloomsbury �16.99, 240 pp)<br><br>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  [https://indochinatours.asia/tours/myanmar-adventure-tours/ biking myanmar] spent months recovering from a fever in the care of the head-hunting Naga tribes.<br><br>The reader can barely discern them, either - the truth of his experiences, including the loss of Charlie�s comrades in a Japanese ambush, is revealed only very slowly, via a series of flashbacks and through Charlie�s own accounts to Claire, which have the hallucinatory, unstable quality of a memory  [https://www.myanmartour.com/adventure_myanmar_tours_tl302.html myanmar adventure tours] that resists being fully retrieved.<br><br>Claire, meanwhile, cooks in their Norfolk farmhouse and waits patiently for her husband to come home properly.<br><br>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.<br><br><br><br><br><br><br>SILENCE IS MY MOTHER TONGUE by Sulaiman Addonia (Indigo �12.99, 288 pp)<br><br>SILENCE IS MY MOTHER TONGUE<br><br>by Sulaiman Addonia (Indigo �12.99, 288 pp)<br><br>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.<br><br>Saba, newly arrived at an East African [http://blogs.Realtown.com/search/?q=refugee refugee] camp with her mother and 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.<br><br>Meanwhile, a local businessman in the camp has struck up a possibly exploitative relationship with Saba�s brother.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.