The Gossamer Fly

by Meira Chand

When her English mother returns to England and her Japanese father claims his children for his homeland--and has an affair with their slatternly housemaid--a young girl is flung into loneliness and desolation

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1980

About the author

Meira Chand is of Indian-Swiss parentage and was born and educated in London at Putney High School. She studied art at St. Martin’s School of Art and later specialised in textile design at Hammersmith Art School. In 1962 she left England to settle in Japan with her Indian husband. Although she spent several years in India in the early 1970s, she afterwards returned again to live in Japan. In 1997 she moved to Singapore, where she currently lives.

The themes of Meira Chand’s novels explore the search for identity and belonging. Five of her novels, The Gossamer Fly, Last Quadrant, The Bonsai Tree, The Painted Cage and A Choice of Evils, are all set in Japan. Contemporary India is the location of House of the Sun that, in 1990, was adapted for the stage in London where it had a successful run at Theatre Royal Stratford East. Also set in India, but in Calcutta during the early days of the Raj, A Far Horizon considers the notorious story of the Black Hole of Calcutta. Her new novel, A Different Sky takes place against the backdrop of colonial pre-Independence Singapore. The book examines an era that includes the Second World War and the subsequent Japanese occupation of Singapore, and also the rise of post-war nationalism in Malaya.

Meira Chand is an associate member of the Centre for the Arts, National University of Singapore and has been Chairperson for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the region of South East Asia and South Pacific. She is involved in several programmes in Singapore to encourage and mentor young writers and to raise awareness in the country to the pleasures of reading. She was most recently writer in residence at Mansfield College, Oxford and also at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia.

Reviews

[Jan Norton · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was written in 1979 and is currently set to be released in January 2019. It is the tale of a child who is half English and half Japanese. Her father is a rental and her mother is English. The mother has a nervous break down. And the new maid is there to take care of Natsuko, her brother and her father. This is the first novel by the author. The story begins showing some of the difficulties the wife had adjusted to Japanese life, but the ending was I story they could’ve been told anywhere in the world.

[Caroline Weber · Rating 1 out of 5]

I thoroughly disliked reading this book. The story of a "half-caste" pre-teen, her feelings of isolation, her exposure to her father's and her Japanese culture's misogyny and rejection of anything and anyone not entirely "Japanese", and her ultimate decision to rebel and abandon her birth-family.

Who could blame her?

Written by someone who is also "mixed race" (Swiss-Indian), raised in London, England, who was living in Japan with her Indian husband.

The book was gifted to me, but I can neither recommend it, nor keep it in my house.