Glorious Boy

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About Glorious Boy

Product Description "The most memorable and original novel I've read in ages... evokes every side in a multi-cultural conversation with sympathy and rare understanding." - Pico Iyer   For fans of Michael Ondaatje's Warlight and Lily King's Euphoria... Glorious Boy is a sweeping tale of war and devotion, longing and loss, and the power of love to prevail.   "Bound by ambition and a sense of adventure, Claire and Shep Durant journey to the Andaman Islands, a remote part of colonial India, in1936. They dive deep into their work: Claire, an anthropologist, is studying the language and customs of the Biya tribe; Shep, a surgeon, is collecting orchid specimens, hoping for significant medicinal applications. Claire's plans change when she becomes pregnant and gives birth to Ty, whose ability to speak never materializes and whose bond to Claire and Shep seems weaker than his attachment to Naila, a household employee. When the war escalates, the Andamans become a target, and the Durants prepare to evacuate-but Ty goes missing. Against her will, Claire goes on without her son and husband. The search for Ty is fraught with more danger than Shep could have ever imagined, and Claire must figure out how she can help from her new post in Calcutta. As the war churns on and hope dwindles, the entire family--biological and otherwise--will be forced to question their allegiances and obligations, and to determine what place is, for them, truly home." - Margo Littell, The Seattle Review Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. First, a small uninhabitable pincushion of palm trees appeared on the turquoise sea. Then a massive green monolith rose behind it, like a waking dinosaur. The behemoth’s coat of forest green undulated, dense and vast as a creature in its own right—a creature intent on driving the slender white snake of beach back into the ocean. “There's no one there,” she said, struck by the confounding blend of beauty, humidity, and heat that seemed to emanate from the island. “No seeums,” Shep quipped, but his heart wasn’t in it, either. Claire gripped the bulwark, fighting a surge of nausea. His arm wound like a question mark around her waist. Who did they think they were fooling? Both of them, impostors. Over the next six hours the shoreline remained relentlessly wild. They spotted a couple of isolated coastal villages, but even these looked deserted. Then a distant lighthouse blinked. Atop a bluff beyond, a regimental block of concrete rose, spiked with gleaming antennae. “There.” Shep looked up from the gazetteer spread-eagled in his palm. Hope and relief cracked his voice as he pointed out Ross Island, their new home. The hillock stretched like a long green breaker at the entrance to a harbor that abruptly bristled with boats. A mirage is how Claire will remember this first impression. A miniature replica of the world she thought she’d left behind. A dark gothic church with a soaring steeple. The semblance of a town square and parade ground. Victorian houses along the ridge, with gabled roofs and wide verandas, pale gingerbread trim. The colonial residents themselves were scarce, but small brown figures in white uniforms appeared and disappeared among the towering shade trees, multiplying at the southern end of the island, where the western architecture yielded to a dark brick scramble of shop houses and the humanity of a bazaar. The Hindu temple on the waterfront resembled a multicolored stack of Life Savers. The Ross cantonment was the seat of British power for the entire Andaman archipelago, but to reach it, they had first to continue across the harbor to disembark on the “mainland,” where Port Blair proper stretched like a lizard's claw out of the forest’s interior. There, white-washed bungalows like those throughout India ranged along the slopes, and high on the lizard's outmost knuckle stood an imposing fortress with rose-colored crenellations. “The Cellular Jail,” Shep said. Claire gazed up at the