Amazon.co.uk Review
Peter Ho Davies takes his title for this, his second collection of short stories, from EM Forster, writing on the "sad, strange irony" whereby children are not bound to parents as parents are to children-and "equal love" is never possible. Davies' dozen pieces all focus on this vexed parent-child bond but it is to his credit that we're never aware of his master plan. For among Davies's many talents is the ability to create each story in its own world, with its own tone, pace and style, its own reference points--even its own vocabulary. The opening, deeply moving account of a childless couple's alleged encounter with a UFO, for example, can signal its 1950s US setting with the quiet placing of just three, era-specific words: "conniption", "simonize" and "prophylactics". Entering the Chinese-American world, preparing one of their own for "The Next Life", forces a cross-cultural reconsideration of what death and "sonhood" mean.
By the end of this emotionally complex, thoughtful book, Forster's despondent certainty about unequal love seems a sweeping simplification. Although Davies's own background--Welsh-Chinese parentage, raised in Coventry, teaching in Michigan, resident in Cambridge--explains at least some of the range, it takes real talent to conjure the first-person of a young girl losing her milk teeth or an "unfit mother" recalling the smell of her stolen child's nappies. Davies won plaudits and prizes for his first collection, The Ugliest House in the World; Equal Love fully vindicates his early promise and should find him a whole host of new admirers.--Alan Stewart
Product Description
Peter Ho Davies's award-winning debut collection, THE UGLIEST HOUSE IN THE WORLD, drew comparisons to the work of Raymond Carver, James Joyce, and V. S. Naipaul. The Washington Post hailed it as "astounding . . . Davies has left a unique, definitive footprint in the soil of contemporary short fiction." In his new collection, Davies's unforgettable characters -- a Chinese son gambling with professional mourners, a mixed-race couple who experience a close encounter -- strive for a love that transcends time, race, and sexuality. These are the stories of a sandwich generation -- children of one century, adults of the next -- caught between debts to their parents and what they owe their own offspring. Shot through with humor and grace, EQUAL LOVE confirms Davies's reputation as one of his generation's foremost writers.
