Rhoda Kwan

1 month ago | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Rhoda Kwan

“These are strange times, my dear, they smell your breath to see if you have spoken of love.” In Shida Bazyar’s The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran, an old Iranian woman recites verses of Persian poetry as she feeds forbidden books to a growing flame. Years later, this small act of resistance lingers in her daughter-in-law Nahid’s mind as she pieces together a new life in West Germany. It’s among other memories she revisits before she rises to take care of her two children.

2 months ago | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Rhoda Kwan

Vijay Khurana’s novel The Passenger Seat opens on two teenagers in freefall. Adam and Teddy drop from a bridge towards dark water, each heedless of anything but proving themselves to be man enough in the eyes of the other. It begins as a gridlocked competition. Adam is older; Teddy has a girlfriend. Adam can drive; Teddy has a gun licence. Their uneasy friendship is built on showmanship and a mutual urge to assert themselves, to perform their nascent masculinity.

Feb 7, 2025 | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Rhoda Kwan

In Uchenna Awoke’s debut novel, The Liquid Eye of a Moon, 15-year-old Dimkpa, his parents’ first-born son, yearns to pull himself out of his family’s poverty and shame in his small Nigerian village. He does not understand why a stigma hangs over his home, but he is determined to rise above it, to make a fortune and better the life he was born into.

Oct 11, 2024 | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Rhoda Kwan

“Aging is a mess,” declares the protagonist of Brian Castro’s 10th novel, Chinese Postman. Abraham Quin is a 74-year-old literary professor who lives on his property in the Adelaide Hills with his dogs, his memories, the ghosts of three failed marriages and nightmares of shitting himself in public. He talks, he muses in the novel’s opening pages, mostly to himself.

Mar 28, 2024 | chinabooksreview.com | Taili Ni |Rhoda Kwan

During a winter evening in February 2020, two university students in Amsterdam braved the cold in their best dresses to cycle along its canals. It was a farewell ride. For one of them, Hong Kong journalist-turned-politician Gwyneth Ho, that evening would be one of her last moments of freedom before returning home. One year later, she, along with most of the city’s political opposition, were behind bars.