Glorious Boy

What will it take to save Ty? This is the question that haunts Claire and Shep Durant in the wake of their four-year-old’s disappearance. Until this moment, Port Blair’s British surgeon and his young wife, a promising anthropologist, have led a charmed life in the colonial backwaters of India’s Andaman Islands—thanks in part to Naila, a local girl who shares their mysteriously mute son’s silent language. But with the war closing in and mandatory evacuation underway, the Durants don’t realize until too late that Naila and Ty have vanished. While Claire sails for Calcutta, Shep stays to search for the children. Days later, the Japanese invade the Andamans, cutting off all communication. Fueled by guilt and anguish, Claire uses her unique knowledge of the islands’ tribes to make herself indispensable to an all-male reconnaissance team headed back behind enemy lines. Her secret plan: rescue Shep and Ty. Through the brutal odyssey that follows, she’ll discover truths about sacrifice that both shatter and transcend her understanding of devotion.

NOW AVAILABLE – GLORIOUS BOY READING GUIDE

PRAISE FOR GLORIOUS BOY

“The most memorable and original novel I’ve read in ages. Aimee Liu… evokes every side in a multi-cultural conversation with sympathy and rare understanding.”—Pico Iyer

“Reminiscent of the tone and atmosphere of Somerset Maugham and George Orwell’s Asia-set novels, Glorious Boy is a Second World War story of adventure and loss, uniquely set in the Andaman Islands, one of India’s farthest flung territories”—Asian Review of Books

“An absolutely gorgeous historical novel about ambition, culture clash, love, atonement, and one silent boy, set against the backdrop of a tribe in the Andamans struggling with British rule. So blisteringly alive, you feel the swampy heat and the bugs; so emotionally true, it grips at every page. Just magnificent and not to be missed.”—Caroline Leavitt New York Times Bestselling author of Pictures of You and Cruel Beautiful World

FEATURED IN

A photograph of a beach at sunset and a boys face at the center with white script that reads Glorious Boy a novel by Aimee Liu.

Aimee Liu ( Author Website )

Publication Date: May 12, 2020

Genre/Imprint: Fiction, Red Hen Press

$18.95 Tradepaper

Shop: Red Hen, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble

ISBN: 978-1-59709-889-2

News

Aimee Liu featured in the Los Angeles Times!

The second dose was supposed to be my reunion pass. Thanks to COVID-19, I couldn’t get back to Connecticut for my mother’s 100th birthday at Christmastime, but once we were […]

Hoopla: July Riveting Reads

Hoopla featured Aimee Liu’s Glorious Boy on their list of Riveting Reads for July 2020. Find the entire list here.

Read Your Way Around the World

With travel plans cancelled for the foreseeable future, we’re all looking for new ways to feel transported from our homes, without putting our families at risk. That’s where these book […]

Author2Author with Aimee Liu

Bill welcomes novelist, essayist, and teacher Aimee Liu to the show. Aimee is the author of numerous bestselling novels as well as nonfiction books on medical and psychological topics. Her […]

The Booklist Reader: Glorious Boy

Liu’s eponymous “glorious boy” exists at the intersection of families, communities, countries, cultures—and, for a while, life and death. His spirited, adventurous parents—Shep, a British doctor obsessed with the healing […]

Reviews

GLORIOUS BOY by Aimee Liu reviewed by La viduité

Decode the savagery of silence, the language of separation and guilt, also deceive that of the enemy. A rather classic novel in its form, in its informed reconstruction of a little-known […]

A Point of Change

Aimee Liu’s Glorious Boy gives readers a portrait of a young mother and fledgling anthropologist caught in a remote outpost in the midst of World War Two. Two of Liu’s three previous […]

Writers’ Voices: Aimee Liu Sets

In the South Asian archipelago known as the Andaman Islands, aboriginal tribes thrived for 60,000 years before the onset of British colonialism nearly wiped them out. Best selling novelist Aimee […]

Historical Novel Society: Glorious Boy

1942: Clair and Shep Durant, along with their mute four-year-old son, Ty, wait for evacuation to India before the imminent Japanese invasion of the remote Andaman Islands. Shep, a doctor, […]

Seattle Book Review: Glorious Boy

Bound by ambition and a sense of adventure, Claire and Shep Durant journey to the Andaman Islands, a remote part of colonial India, in 1936. They dive deep into their […]

Asian Review of Books: Glorious Boy by Aimee Liu

Channeling some past classics also skeptical of the colonial enterprise, Glorious Boy stands out from the crowded shelves of World War II literature by immersing the reader in one of the remoter […]

Library Journal: Glorious Boy starred review

Liu’s eponymous “glorious boy” exists at the intersection of families, communities, countries, cultures—and, for a while, life and death. His spirited, adventurous parents—Shep, a British doctor obsessed with the healing […]