The Distant Land Of My Father - Softcover

Caldwell, Bo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099427966 ISBN 13: 9780099427964

Publisher: Arrow, 2003

Synopsis

'My father was a millionaire in Shanghai in the 1930s.'Anna Schoene was a golden child. Her parents, Joseph and Genevieve, were rich American expats in Shanghai before the Japanese invaded, before the war intervened. Joseph Schoene had made his fortune living on his wits. He was in love with Shanghai, with China, with the idea of taking risks. Completely devoted to his daughter, he imbued her with the same love of China's turbulent city that he had. To Anna, it seemed that the idyll would last forever. But when the Japanese army invaded, when war finally came, even Anna knew that the dream was over. Joseph, however, refused to leave. Instead, he sent his wife and daughter back to the States with the promise that they would soon be reunited. But that, too, would prove to be a dream. Anna grows up in Los Angeles and slowly, over the years, begins to learn the real story of her father - both then in Shanghai and, finally, his last years in California. Their story, ultimately, is one of love and forgiveness - and of the great gifts that a parent can give a child-The Distant Land of My Father is a moving, engaging and triumphant novel of discovery and rediscovery.

About this title

Review:

Shanghai in the 1930s was an exotic, magical place for a girl to grow up. Anna, the narrator of Bo Caldwell's lush and epic first novel, "The Distant Land of My Father" (Chronicle Books, 373 pp., $23.95), has a kind of royalty for parents. Her father, Joseph, the son of missionaries, has been leading a charmed and privileged life, albeit with a secret existence as a smuggler. Her mother, Genevieve, a Californian by birth, has a radiant elegance. Young Anna knew "even as a child that she was beautiful, not the way children think their mothers are--I knew she was fromt he way men stared when she entered the room, the way other women regarded her, the intensity with which my father watched her." The family's fairy-tale existence begins to fall apart with the Japanese occupation of China. Anna and her mother flee to California, but Joseph chooses power and fortune over family and remains behind. Over the years, the vicissitudes of war and politics leave their mark. Joseph suffers under the hands of the Japanese and Chinese Communists. His wife and daughter cope with feelings of betrayal and loss. As 14-year-old Anna reels from a short visit from her father, she writes: "I felt different every day, as though I were controlled by some force outside myself. One morning I woke up happy and couldn't wait to get to school. Three hours later, I'd be despondent and discouraged, almost in tears over a bad grade on a quiz or my friends not waiting for me for lunch." Caldwell, who has published short shories in numerous literary magazines and lives in Northern California with her children and husband, novelist Ron Hansen, writes vividly and with great historical perspecitve. Against a background of Pearl Harbor and Mao Zedong, she grapples with the more personal issues of redemption, love and the healing power of forgiveness. -San Jose Mercury News This is a marvelous story, straightforward without being prosaic, full of momentum yet complex and unpredictable. Bo Caldwell's novelized memoir of her father and of their lives in Shanghai in the 1930s and '40s, portrays an idyllic childhood, vividly remembered, a time of verandahs and parties and white linen suits, that is abruptly shattered when the Japanese invade Shanghai. There are bloody bodies and kidnappings and burning buildings, but more painful is the steady erosion of the child's faith in her father. "The Distant Land of My Father" is a study of the glittering visions that wear us down; to ashes or diamonds.-Los Angeles Times Book Review

From the Publisher:

An astonishingly accomplished, vibrant and moving first novel set against the Shanghai background of Empire of the Sun and taking the reader to a final resolution in today's Los Angeles. An unforgettable novel of discovery, loss and rediscovery, The Distant Land of My Father is both a magical evocation of a lost world and a deeply moving exploration of a remarkable father-daughter relationship.

About this edition

• Publisher: Arrow
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0099427966
• ISBN 13: 9780099427964
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384