With 2020 marking the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, Glorious Boy is a gorgeous and heart-breaking rendering of a family indelibly impacted by war. It’s a stunning blend of fiction with real-life events, set against a backdrop unfamiliar to most — the South Asian archipelago known as the Andaman Islands, home to aboriginal tribes that date back 60,000 years to the first Great Coastal Migration out of Africa. After thriving in isolation for millennia, these tribes began dying out after the British arrived in the mid-1800s to build a penal colony on South Andaman, and many were already extinct by 1936. Liu was inspired to write the novel after she dreamed about a family intertwined with the tribes that became caught up in the Japanese occupation of the islands during WWII.
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