By Bill Cushing
FROM: Cultural Weekly

In her fourth novel, Glorious Boy, Aimee Liu begins with a marvelously mysterious and enticing scenario: “When Shep lifts the blackout shades, a thin film of gray invades the bedroom, exposing his annoyance.”

However, this is more the story of Claire, his wife, than of Shep. That isn’t to say it only follows her. Opening in 1942, Claire’s story actually starts in 1936 when she meets Shep, a young doctor guilty of a youthful error in treatment that led the British empire to “punish” him by effectively exiling him to New York. She sees him as “serious” and “disarming” as well as one of the few men who takes her dreams of studying primitive cultures seriously.

A month later, they are married and on their way to his duty station, the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal where he will serve as a doctor at Port Blair. Ironically, given that Shep is still undergoing his penance, the island operates as a British penal colony for political prisoners.

Once there, they hire Nalia, an eight-year-old who’s “not pretty, but obviously perceptive,” to care for their infant son, Ty, the “glorious boy” of the title. Claire notes that the young girl possesses “an uncanny ability to intuit whatever Ty wanted or needed—as if the children had their own spiritual language.” The young boy seems to straddle the “primitive” and “civilized.” Read Rest of Article Here