It’s tough going, the pace sometimes glacial, the tone sometimes oppressive, but that nail in the skull serves as an indelible metaphor for a country for whom the wiping out of collective memory is embedded within the national psyche.Ī Scatter of Light by Malinda Lo (Coronet £16.99, 336 pp)įamiliar themes of adolescent self-discovery and sexual awakening combine in this second novel by the Asian-American author Malinda Lo, which also serves as a companion piece to her bestselling debut Last Night At The Telegraph Club.įollowing a high school scandal in which topless photographs of her were posted online without her consent, 18-year-old Aria is sent to spend the summer near San Francisco with her grandmother, an artist, at the behest of her conservative-minded Chinese mother who can’t quite believe Aria was not in some way responsible for what happened.Īria’s expectations of a dull month are upended, though, when she develops feelings for Steph, her grandmother’s part-time gardener, who is in a long-term relationship with another woman. The question haunts Cheng Gong and Li Jiaqi, the two protagonists at the heart of this dense mysterious novel who, having grown up together in the 1980s, are determined as adults to discover the secret that has shaped the lives of their grandparents and, of course, their own.īoth take it in turns to narrate - although it doesn’t help that it’s sometimes hard to tell each character apart - as the story circles slowly backwards to that fateful night and in doing so forces Cheng Gong and Li Jiaqi into a reckoning with both their family history and the horrors of China’s buried past. What really happened in an abandoned water tower in a rural Chinese province at the height of the Cultural Revolution in 1967 to leave a man in a coma, a nail embedded into his skull? Cocoon by Zhang Yueran (World Editions £13.99, 328 pp)
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