New Books In Literature

The Night Tiger (Flatiron Books, 2019) is much more than just a fantasy novel—it’s also a mystery, a historical novel, and a love story. Yang-Sze Choo accomplishes all this in one deft package. Set in Malaysia in the 1930s, in the state of Perak, The Night Tiger closely follows three narrators, mysteriously interlinked by their names. There is a clever orphan named Ren who works as a houseboy, a spunky and funny young beauty, Ji Lin, and a British surgeon, William Acton.Though the novel is grounded in mundane concerns, such as Ji Lin’s effort to pay back her mother’s gambling debt before her step-father discovers it, there are also numinous aspects, such as the waking-dream states that Ji-Lin and Ren enter, during which they communicate with Ren’s dead brother. Even as Ji Lin tried to cope with the restricted options available to a woman of that time period, and surgeon William Acton grapples with his lusty urges, a shimmer of the supernatural imbues the narrative, and a sense of transcendent beauty weaves it