Skip to main content

Book Recommendation: How We Disappeared by Jing-Jing Lee

Book Recommendation: 
How We Disappeared by Jing-Jing Lee



What it's about: 
A beautiful, stunningly ambitious novel set in Singapore about a woman who survived the Japanese occupation and a man who thought he had lost everything. For fans of Min Jin Lee's Pachinko and Georgia Hunter’s We Were the Lucky Ones.

Singapore, 1942. As Japanese troops sweep down Malaysia and into Singapore, a village is ransacked, leaving only two survivors and one tiny child.

In a neighboring village, seventeen-year-old Wang Di is bundled into the back of a troop carrier and shipped off to a Japanese military brothel where she is forced into sexual slavery. After sixty years of silence, what she saw and experienced there still haunts her present.

In the year 2000, twelve-year-old Kevin is determined to find out the truth – wherever it might lead – after his grandmother makes a surprising confession on her deathbed, one she never meant Kevin to hear, setting in motion a chain of events he could never have foreseen.

Weaving together two timelines and two very big secrets, this stunning debut opens a window on a little-known period of history, revealing the strength and bravery shown by numerous women in the face of terrible cruelty. A profoundly moving novel, it is based partly on the author's great-grandfather’s experiences. (goodreads)


Thank you @TLCbooktours for my copy! Check out the #HowWeDisappeared blog tour and instagram tour to read more about the book! 



About Jing-Jing Lee: Born and raised in Singapore, Jing-Jing graduated from Oxford’s Creative Writing Master’s in 2011 and has since seen her poetry and short stories published in various journals and anthologies. Jing-Jing's novella, If I Could Tell You, was published by Marshall Cavendish in 2013 and her debut poetry collection, And Other Rivers, was published by Math Paper Press in 2015. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Book Review: The Girl On The Train

If you follow  top book lists, you've more than likely heard of The Girl On the Train by Paula Hawkins If you still have a book hangover from Gone Girl like I do, you'll be happy about this twisted story. It's gritty, mean, obsessive and dark, just like Amy Dunn. Although it didn't get my heart racing, (a little too vague at some points) it did have twists that left me stunned.    Rachel is an alcoholic. A sad, lonely woman who tortures herself by riding a train everyday and looking out the window at her ex-husband's house. The house that used to be theirs together, only now it's him inside with his new wife, and their baby. And she's just a girl on a train.  She watches them, knows they had a baby girl because of the new pink curtains in the window. She can see them laughing and playing on the patio. And even though it kills her, she still watches them every day. She even starts daydreaming about the lives of their neighbors, a happy...

Book Review: The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware

Ruth Ware always delivers when it comes to interesting and layered characters. The Turn of the Key is a thrilling account of Rowan Caine's experience as a live-in nanny in a luxurious smart home unlike anything she has ever seen. This mystery is the epitome of the saying "if it's too good to be true, it probably is" because even though moving into the home of the Elincourts is an upgrade from her tiny apartment and dead-end job, it comes at a steep price. Every chapter, there is something suspicious that kept me wondering if anyone in this suspenseful book was telling the truth. Which, is obvious in the first page because Rowan is writing a letter to a lawyer, from jail, because she's being held for murder. Who is Rowan? Did she come into the Elincourt's lives for a reason? She should have known something was wrong on the day she interviewed, when one of the children warned her to never come back. With a house full of surveillance cameras and parents who ar...

Book Review: The Fault In Our Stars

            I wish I had enough words to describe this book to you. I'll just start with giving it this rating:   From GoodReads.com: Diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer at 13, Hazel was prepared to die until, at 14, a medical miracle shrunk the tumours in her lungs... for now. Two years post-miracle, sixteen-year-old Hazel is post-everything else, too; post-high school, post-friends and post-normalcy. And even though she could live for a long time (whatever that means), Hazel lives tethered to an oxygen tank, the tumours tenuously kept at bay with a constant chemical assault. Enter Augustus Waters. A match made at cancer kid support group, Augustus is gorgeous, in remission, and shockingly to her, interested in Hazel. Being with Augustus is both an unexpected destination and a long-needed journey, pushing Hazel to re-examine how sickness and health, life and death, will define her and the legacy that everyone leaves behind. ...