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The Golden Land
Winner of the AWP Prize for the Novel
Winner of the AWP Prize for the Novel, The Golden Land digs deep into the complexities of family history and relationships. Etta Montgomery is a Boston-based labor lawyer coming to terms with the love and loss she experienced as a teenager during a 1988 family reunion in Burma. When Etta’s grandmother dies, she is compelled to travel back to Myanmar (Burma) to explore the complicated adolescent memories of her grandmother’s family and the violence she witnessed there. Full of rich detail and intricate relationships, The Golden Land seeks to uncover those personal narratives that might lie beneath the surface of historical accounts.
Winner of the AWP Prize for the Novel, The Golden Land digs deep into the complexities of family history and relationships. Etta Montgomery is a Boston-based labor lawyer coming to terms with the love and loss she experienced as a teenager during a 1988 family reunion in Burma. When Etta’s grandmother dies, she is compelled to travel back to Myanmar (Burma) to explore the complicated adolescent memories of her grandmother’s family and the violence she witnessed there. Full of rich detail and intricate relationships, The Golden Land seeks to uncover those personal narratives that might lie beneath the surface of historical accounts.
- GenresFiction
303 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 6, 2024
3 people are currently reading
3271 people want to read
About the author
Elizabeth Shick
1 book18 followersElizabeth Shick is an award-winning novelist whose writing is influenced by her many years abroad—including six years in Myanmar, where THE GOLDEN LAND is set. With a background in international development, she has also lived and worked in Angola, Bangladesh, Gambia, Italy, Malawi, Mozambique, and Tanzania. She now lives in Massachusetts, where she works as Adult Program Coordinator for the Vineyard Haven Library and serves on the Board of her MFA alumni association, Cambridge Common Writers. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from Lesley University and a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University. Her debut novel, THE GOLDEN LAND, is the winner of the 2021 AWP Prize for the Novel.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
December 27, 2022
What a wonderful debut novel! It’s about a woman who travels to Myanmar to better understand her heritage when her Burmese grandmother dies. It’s also about the inadequacy of childhood memories, and complex family dynamics, and a country torn apart again and again. The author captured Yangon so well; I’m so touched by all of the little details that brought me back. I lived there for 5 years, and I will never claim to understand Myanmar, but this book explained things to me in a way no one ever has (in the author’s note, she says “to me, fiction is the ultimate act of empathy”—which is exactly what I’m trying to say!). I find myself longing for Myanmar, despite my very complicated feelings about the place, and I am grateful to the author for this enjoyable and memorable reading experience.
December 7, 2022
In this stunning debut, author @elizabethshickauthor takes on an achingly raw and remarkably vivid journey of a Burmese American attempting to reconcile her past. In this memorable dual-timeline novel, the reader is as captivated by Etta's current life, as by the fairly recent historical events that she and her family were caught in the middle of in Burma in the late 80s. All at once a coming-of-age story and a tribute to the importance of family, The Golden Land is a powerful meditation on the weight of our own cultural history.
As always, I am captivated by historical fiction, specifically recent history that I was alive for, but too young to understand the significance of. Enter authors such as Ms. Shick to engage readers in stories that teach and enlighten.
If you're looking for a novel that relays cultural understanding of Mayanmar's political unrest in an accessible manner, look no further!
For more of my reviews, please check out my blog at www.mamasgottaread.blogspot.com or follow me on Instagram at www.instagram.com/mamasgottaread.
As always, I am captivated by historical fiction, specifically recent history that I was alive for, but too young to understand the significance of. Enter authors such as Ms. Shick to engage readers in stories that teach and enlighten.
If you're looking for a novel that relays cultural understanding of Mayanmar's political unrest in an accessible manner, look no further!
For more of my reviews, please check out my blog at www.mamasgottaread.blogspot.com or follow me on Instagram at www.instagram.com/mamasgottaread.
February 10, 2023
Beautifully written - could have been a true story
The elegant but simple prose reflected the complexity of the country and brought Yangon back to life.
For those of us who have lived there, it will be difficult to believe that this is a work of fiction. For those who haven’t lived there or visited, this novel is an excellent introduction to the multi-layered realities of Myanmar.
The elegant but simple prose reflected the complexity of the country and brought Yangon back to life.
For those of us who have lived there, it will be difficult to believe that this is a work of fiction. For those who haven’t lived there or visited, this novel is an excellent introduction to the multi-layered realities of Myanmar.
November 5, 2024
A novel, about thirty-something American, one quarter Burmese, woman trying to make sense of her self and her upbringing, before she gets married. The story becomes a fascinating journey into multigenerational family dymanics and a revelation of what the country, now called Myanmar, has gone through. Every member of the family is emotionally supressed and it feels like it's a metaphor for, or maybe an incarnation of the country's political troubles. It's beautifully written, rich with details about the culture, and ultimately satisfying. A must read!
June 28, 2024
Congratulations to Elizabeth Shick on this beautiful debut novel. Her endearing characters and evocative settings drew me in from the first page. We feel the angst of being torn between cultures, mourning for a time and place that can no longer exist, and the indelible power of first love. Shick pulls out all the stops, with her brilliant descriptions and artful plot lines that weave in and out of the decades, but it's not heavy-handed or ever too much. The Golden Land will stay with me for a long time.
July 29, 2023
I loved this novel for immersing me both in the lives of the characters and mysterious Myanmar. Gorgeous prose and an engrossing story - a lovely, nuanced portrayal of the relationship between the two sisters and the lasting repercussions of an event that fractured a family.
October 10, 2024
Burma versus Myanmar, and what that means to a Burmese American family, a country, and the world (Boston, Massachusetts, Rangoon, Burma/Yangon, Myanmar; 2011 and 1998, 2001 backstory): “How is it possible for such beauty to exist alongside evil?” asks Etta, the thirty-seven-year-old, “quarter Burmese” narrator of Elizabeth Shick’s mesmerizing historical novel.
Burma/Myanmar is a Southeast Asian country so few of us know. You’ll be in awe of how much you learn.
The Golden Land is a remarkable reading experience – emotionally, culturally, historically. An ambitious undertaking few contemporary novels have tackled given how closed off the country has been to the outside world for decades. The best known novel set in Burma was written in the 1930s by George Orwell, Burmese Days; and, we learn, his two classic tyranny novels, Animal Farm and 1984, were part of a trilogy based on his Burmese background.
Burma/Myanmar is, then, historically and fictionally complex. The first question is the country’s name. Is it Burma, as known for a century, or Myanmar since 1989? The US (and UK) still officially call it Burma. By centering the fictional plot coinciding with a momentous modern historical date in the centuries-old country pinpoints a dramatic turning point for Etta’s family, underscoring the significance of the question and why the refusal to acknowledge the new name.
The book’s title reflects another name for the country – the “Golden Land” – confirming Etta’s befuddlement and emotional disequilibrium. A clashing of ancient lands steeped in a rich and diverse culture, sacred beliefs, monthly festivals following the Buddhist Zodiac calendar, shimmering golden temples – two Etta visits – with a long history of civil war, military dictatorship, ethnic violence, genocide.
The Golden Land takes us to all.
How then does one reconcile its vastly predominant religion, Buddhism, based on the original Buddha’s spiritual teachings and meditative practices of Siddhartha Gautama, cited, to attain peacefulness and non-violence? A country known for its exquisite artistic craftsmanship, such as its marionette puppets and lacquerware, also featured in the storytelling.
Rudyard Kipling in Letters to the East in the late 1800s told us Burma “is quite unlike any land you know about.” Shick infuses that sense of the mystical in the novel, presumably from having lived in Myanmar for six years, and from nearly thirty years of international development and humanitarian work. Wordcrafting also creates the mystique.
Compassion for the Burmese people is seen in Etta’s struggles and through other main characters:
Ahpwa: Etta’s maternal Burmese grandmother, a powerful force influencing and disturbing the family’s dynamics. She’s the one who’s kept the Burmese culture alive, after immigrating to Boston living with the family. Her sudden death triggers the plot.
Parker: Etta’s twenty-nine-year-old sister. Closer to Ahpwa, she rushes back to a country she hasn’t been to since she was seven believing her grandmother wanted her ashes spread somewhere over her homeland.
Shwe: Etta instantly bonded with her second, charismatic older cousin when the family traveled to Burma in that fateful year. The two inseparable until the family abruptly left without her telling him or understanding why. Shwe sets the intense tone, representing human rights activists and journalists who courageously want his people and the world to know what’s really going on.
Shwe and Etta witnessed a traumatic event referred to as “White Bridge,” also known as the 8888 Uprising. The freedom-fighting leader was Aung San Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize, spent years in and out of house arrest. How ironic that she said, “The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear” – the epigraph introducing the story – when she later supported atrocities against one of the country’s ethnic minorities, the Rohingya Muslims. A humanitarian refugee crisis still going on today.
By the time Shick states in her Author’s Note her mission – “to communicate to the outside world the fascinating, cautionary history of Myanmar and the remarkable resilience and ingenuity of the Myanmar people” – readers have taken to heart her passion “to support the people of Myanmar in their quest for justice.” Shick splits her time between Massachusetts and Bangladesh, a country with over a million Rohingya refugees living in UNHCR camps.
The story is told movingly by dividing a Boston-Burmese family’s fate into pre-and post-1988, pre Burma and post Myanmar. The first two parts alternate between Boston in 2011 and Yangon, Myanmar as well as Boston and 1988 Rangoon, Burma; the third part told only in 2011. This literary technique lets us see back-to-back the long-term effects of violence and how a family’s silence about it with their children and amongst themselves tore it apart.
One of those noticeably silent is Etta and Parker’s mother. The absence of her voice seems to emphasize the Burmese culture of obedience to and respect for elders, the good and the bad depicted. Etta is the one haunted by what she saw in 1988 but at thirteen when she visited Burma she only sensed something terrible had happened, while Parker was too young to even know anything did.
Given what Etta surmises happened, given how her parents and grandmother fell apart when they returned home from a planned year in Burma that ended up lasting only three months, Etta doesn’t believe Parker is right about their grandmother’s wishes.
Etta is the serious one, a lawyer; Parker the undisciplined, easygoing one without a job. How their characters and relationship changes is another novelistic strength as they delve into their grandmother’s life to figure out what she’d want them to do and where, when they discover a fascinating culture and an open-arms welcoming by their extended family. (Their parents died earlier we’re told.) Etta isn’t inclined to rush anywhere like her flighty sister, though she constantly worries about her.
She’s also worrying about Jason, the man she’s engaged to she’s kept in the dark about Burma, to the extent of her clarity, omitting her soulful relationship with Shwe. The two have not communicated for twenty-three years. An intense, youthful experience that seems to have cemented Etta’s alienation, thrust in-between two very different worlds and cultures. She may have pushed her feelings for Shwe deep down when she met a man who’s so good for her, but Parker’s trip to Myanmar has opened Pandora’s Box. Seen in the novel as her grandmother’s chest, inheriting the key to it.
The chest serves as a vehicle for unearthing more hidden mysteries, these about Ahpwa’s life in Burma and Boston. Some nostalgic and poignant, others unsettling. All revealing.
A heartfelt one, handled with grace and loveliness, sparked when Etta finds a tangled, broken mess of Burmese marionettes in the chest. It leads to meeting a character who touches us, and connects to Burma’s last royal dynasty when King Thibaw and Queen Supayalat reined. Their legend is a consuming childhood memory that may not have been truthful, distorted by a patriarchal society.
Somehow Shick seamlessly blends all these fictional storylines into an ancient and contemporary historical and cultural story. With the State Department issuing a Level 4 red flag alert that Myanmar it is too dangerous for Americans to visit, Shick lets us in.
Burma/Myanmar is a Southeast Asian country so few of us know. You’ll be in awe of how much you learn.
The Golden Land is a remarkable reading experience – emotionally, culturally, historically. An ambitious undertaking few contemporary novels have tackled given how closed off the country has been to the outside world for decades. The best known novel set in Burma was written in the 1930s by George Orwell, Burmese Days; and, we learn, his two classic tyranny novels, Animal Farm and 1984, were part of a trilogy based on his Burmese background.
Burma/Myanmar is, then, historically and fictionally complex. The first question is the country’s name. Is it Burma, as known for a century, or Myanmar since 1989? The US (and UK) still officially call it Burma. By centering the fictional plot coinciding with a momentous modern historical date in the centuries-old country pinpoints a dramatic turning point for Etta’s family, underscoring the significance of the question and why the refusal to acknowledge the new name.
The book’s title reflects another name for the country – the “Golden Land” – confirming Etta’s befuddlement and emotional disequilibrium. A clashing of ancient lands steeped in a rich and diverse culture, sacred beliefs, monthly festivals following the Buddhist Zodiac calendar, shimmering golden temples – two Etta visits – with a long history of civil war, military dictatorship, ethnic violence, genocide.
The Golden Land takes us to all.
How then does one reconcile its vastly predominant religion, Buddhism, based on the original Buddha’s spiritual teachings and meditative practices of Siddhartha Gautama, cited, to attain peacefulness and non-violence? A country known for its exquisite artistic craftsmanship, such as its marionette puppets and lacquerware, also featured in the storytelling.
Rudyard Kipling in Letters to the East in the late 1800s told us Burma “is quite unlike any land you know about.” Shick infuses that sense of the mystical in the novel, presumably from having lived in Myanmar for six years, and from nearly thirty years of international development and humanitarian work. Wordcrafting also creates the mystique.
Compassion for the Burmese people is seen in Etta’s struggles and through other main characters:
Ahpwa: Etta’s maternal Burmese grandmother, a powerful force influencing and disturbing the family’s dynamics. She’s the one who’s kept the Burmese culture alive, after immigrating to Boston living with the family. Her sudden death triggers the plot.
Parker: Etta’s twenty-nine-year-old sister. Closer to Ahpwa, she rushes back to a country she hasn’t been to since she was seven believing her grandmother wanted her ashes spread somewhere over her homeland.
Shwe: Etta instantly bonded with her second, charismatic older cousin when the family traveled to Burma in that fateful year. The two inseparable until the family abruptly left without her telling him or understanding why. Shwe sets the intense tone, representing human rights activists and journalists who courageously want his people and the world to know what’s really going on.
Shwe and Etta witnessed a traumatic event referred to as “White Bridge,” also known as the 8888 Uprising. The freedom-fighting leader was Aung San Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize, spent years in and out of house arrest. How ironic that she said, “The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear” – the epigraph introducing the story – when she later supported atrocities against one of the country’s ethnic minorities, the Rohingya Muslims. A humanitarian refugee crisis still going on today.
By the time Shick states in her Author’s Note her mission – “to communicate to the outside world the fascinating, cautionary history of Myanmar and the remarkable resilience and ingenuity of the Myanmar people” – readers have taken to heart her passion “to support the people of Myanmar in their quest for justice.” Shick splits her time between Massachusetts and Bangladesh, a country with over a million Rohingya refugees living in UNHCR camps.
The story is told movingly by dividing a Boston-Burmese family’s fate into pre-and post-1988, pre Burma and post Myanmar. The first two parts alternate between Boston in 2011 and Yangon, Myanmar as well as Boston and 1988 Rangoon, Burma; the third part told only in 2011. This literary technique lets us see back-to-back the long-term effects of violence and how a family’s silence about it with their children and amongst themselves tore it apart.
One of those noticeably silent is Etta and Parker’s mother. The absence of her voice seems to emphasize the Burmese culture of obedience to and respect for elders, the good and the bad depicted. Etta is the one haunted by what she saw in 1988 but at thirteen when she visited Burma she only sensed something terrible had happened, while Parker was too young to even know anything did.
Given what Etta surmises happened, given how her parents and grandmother fell apart when they returned home from a planned year in Burma that ended up lasting only three months, Etta doesn’t believe Parker is right about their grandmother’s wishes.
Etta is the serious one, a lawyer; Parker the undisciplined, easygoing one without a job. How their characters and relationship changes is another novelistic strength as they delve into their grandmother’s life to figure out what she’d want them to do and where, when they discover a fascinating culture and an open-arms welcoming by their extended family. (Their parents died earlier we’re told.) Etta isn’t inclined to rush anywhere like her flighty sister, though she constantly worries about her.
She’s also worrying about Jason, the man she’s engaged to she’s kept in the dark about Burma, to the extent of her clarity, omitting her soulful relationship with Shwe. The two have not communicated for twenty-three years. An intense, youthful experience that seems to have cemented Etta’s alienation, thrust in-between two very different worlds and cultures. She may have pushed her feelings for Shwe deep down when she met a man who’s so good for her, but Parker’s trip to Myanmar has opened Pandora’s Box. Seen in the novel as her grandmother’s chest, inheriting the key to it.
The chest serves as a vehicle for unearthing more hidden mysteries, these about Ahpwa’s life in Burma and Boston. Some nostalgic and poignant, others unsettling. All revealing.
A heartfelt one, handled with grace and loveliness, sparked when Etta finds a tangled, broken mess of Burmese marionettes in the chest. It leads to meeting a character who touches us, and connects to Burma’s last royal dynasty when King Thibaw and Queen Supayalat reined. Their legend is a consuming childhood memory that may not have been truthful, distorted by a patriarchal society.
Somehow Shick seamlessly blends all these fictional storylines into an ancient and contemporary historical and cultural story. With the State Department issuing a Level 4 red flag alert that Myanmar it is too dangerous for Americans to visit, Shick lets us in.
September 5, 2023
The Golden Land is a compelling book. With its warm-hued cover and opening words: “A thumb of ginger lies on the cutting board,” I was drawn in as soon as I picked it up.
Elizabeth Shick vividly creates a sensual immediacy that grounds her narrator’s quest—across time, culture, and continents—to understand herself and her family in relation to the mythical and political history of Burma. In addition to her strong storytelling, Shick’s ability to sensitively portray the day-to-day challenges of living under an authoritarian regime makes this a salient and timely book.
I came to the last page with a pang, sorry to be leaving the world and people of The Golden Land. In the context of different relationships, Etta, the narrator, gradually opens to the complexity of other lives. As Etta evolves, we come to see each of the other characters more clearly as they are; each a distinctly special human being.
I highly recommend this book!
Elizabeth Shick vividly creates a sensual immediacy that grounds her narrator’s quest—across time, culture, and continents—to understand herself and her family in relation to the mythical and political history of Burma. In addition to her strong storytelling, Shick’s ability to sensitively portray the day-to-day challenges of living under an authoritarian regime makes this a salient and timely book.
I came to the last page with a pang, sorry to be leaving the world and people of The Golden Land. In the context of different relationships, Etta, the narrator, gradually opens to the complexity of other lives. As Etta evolves, we come to see each of the other characters more clearly as they are; each a distinctly special human being.
I highly recommend this book!
October 27, 2024
I loved this book. I couldn't put it down. It's one of those books where the journey is so enjoyable that you don't want to get to the end because you want to continue to be wrapped up by the writing. If you enjoy traveling and learning about new cultures via reading then you might love this book too. This is a first novel by this author. I hope she writes more.
July 26, 2024
3.5 ⭐️ rounded up to 4. This was a quick and informative read. I learned so much about the history and political turmoil of Myanmar (Burma).
American sisters Etta and Parker end up traveling separately to Myanmar after the death of their grandmother. Two timelines are covered, the first in 1988 when the family visited their grandmother’s homeland, the second 2011 to bring her ashes home. Parker has taken her grandmother’s ashes back to Myanmar for burial. Etta follows shortly after to try to come to terms with a traumatic event from 1988 and to resolve her feelings for her childhood love Shwe.
This is a character driven family story that touches on sibling love, childhood trauma, immigration, and differing cultures. It has many descriptive settings, mentions of Myanmar culture and food. Enjoyable read.
Thank you NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.
American sisters Etta and Parker end up traveling separately to Myanmar after the death of their grandmother. Two timelines are covered, the first in 1988 when the family visited their grandmother’s homeland, the second 2011 to bring her ashes home. Parker has taken her grandmother’s ashes back to Myanmar for burial. Etta follows shortly after to try to come to terms with a traumatic event from 1988 and to resolve her feelings for her childhood love Shwe.
This is a character driven family story that touches on sibling love, childhood trauma, immigration, and differing cultures. It has many descriptive settings, mentions of Myanmar culture and food. Enjoyable read.
Thank you NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.
June 1, 2025
I kept reminding myself that this book is fiction. Or at least the story is fiction, but the historical events are true. The author writes about Myanmar, previously Burma, a country of which I had little knowledge. It felt like one of the complex characters, like Etta.
Etta is torn between two cultures and she tries to make sense of her family ties to history as Myanmar struggles with military rule. I will be thinking about this book long after I have passed it on to my family and friends to read.
I especially liked Elizabeth’s Shick’s comments, “I believe that fiction is the ultimate act of empathy, a quality too often lacking in our world. By placing ourselves in the footsteps of others, we can craft a world that is not only kinder but also more just, liberated from the restraints of imperialism and autocracy.”
Etta is torn between two cultures and she tries to make sense of her family ties to history as Myanmar struggles with military rule. I will be thinking about this book long after I have passed it on to my family and friends to read.
I especially liked Elizabeth’s Shick’s comments, “I believe that fiction is the ultimate act of empathy, a quality too often lacking in our world. By placing ourselves in the footsteps of others, we can craft a world that is not only kinder but also more just, liberated from the restraints of imperialism and autocracy.”
February 28, 2024
Elizabeth Shick paints a stunningly vivid portrait of Myanmar that serves as an engaging and integral backdrop to Etta/Aye's journey to untangle both her family's past and her own conflicting emotions. The novel alternates between the past and present, Myanmar and Boston, in a way that continuously builds on what has come before without becoming confusing, creating a clearer picture of past events while also complicating and shifting the reader's (and Etta's) views of the characters. Readers will benefit from learning about the real life events that inspired this story, and will turn the pages in eager anticipation of each new revelation.
November 25, 2024
This is a excellent read for those new to Southeast Asian history and the refugee experience. It offers a compelling story with believable characters against the backdrop of the violence and beauty of several decades of Burmese/Myanmar history. As a professor who teachers Southeast Asia courses, I often ask students to read a novel (from a list of curated novels by Southeast Asian authors), and examine/critique/applaud the depictions in the novel vis a vis what they have learned in class. Although this book is not by a Southeast Asia author, I will add this book to my curated list (making it explicit to students that the author is not Southeast Asian and asking those who select it to reflect on how that may have impacted the representations and the sweep of the story). I found the characters compelling. The novel is told through the eyes of the woman whose maternal grandmother was a Burmese refugee and whose father is American. The main character was raised in the US, but returns to Burma with her family for several months when she is 13. During this period she develops a close relationship with her second cousin and they share a deeply traumatic experience. Her experiences during this visit are interspersed with her current life in the United States and a return to her mother's homeland as an adult. At times, life in Myanmar/Burma was a bit romanticized, but this is understandable given that the main character was not reared in Burma. Overall, this was a page turner and I think my students will enjoy it.
March 6, 2023
The Golden Land by Elizabeth Shick is about a woman caught between two worlds. Etta, with a Burmese mother and an American father, seems unable to move forward in her life until she addresses issues from her past.
The story plays out over two timeframes: 1988, when Etta goes on a family pilgrimage to Burma as a blossoming teenager, and 2011, when newly engaged Etta returns to what is now Myanmar after her grandmother’s death.
Their trip in 1988 is cut short due to political upheaval, and her family never discusses what happened, so Etta is left with many unresolved questions. She’s also heartbroken to leave so abruptly after she’s just fallen in love for the first time.
When Etta returns in 2011, the purpose of her trip is unclear even to her. Does she want to lay her grandmother to rest, to uncover the meaning behind the violence she witnessed as a young girl, or to rekindle her lost love?
I thoroughly enjoyed this thought-provoking tale about the impact of culture on identity.
The story plays out over two timeframes: 1988, when Etta goes on a family pilgrimage to Burma as a blossoming teenager, and 2011, when newly engaged Etta returns to what is now Myanmar after her grandmother’s death.
Their trip in 1988 is cut short due to political upheaval, and her family never discusses what happened, so Etta is left with many unresolved questions. She’s also heartbroken to leave so abruptly after she’s just fallen in love for the first time.
When Etta returns in 2011, the purpose of her trip is unclear even to her. Does she want to lay her grandmother to rest, to uncover the meaning behind the violence she witnessed as a young girl, or to rekindle her lost love?
I thoroughly enjoyed this thought-provoking tale about the impact of culture on identity.
January 6, 2024
Through the framing device of the story of our biracial protagonist Etta returning to Myanmar in the wake of her grandmother’s death, Elizabeth Shick manages to capture a lot of the cultural nuances, historical background and contemporary politics that make up the story of modern-day Myanmar. Our own fraught relationship with this neighbor of ours means a lot of this stuff is unknown to your average Bangladeshi reader, so this was definitely an eye-opening read.
November 7, 2023
I enjoyed learning a bit more about Myanmar history while also being engrossed in an intriguing story. I couldn't put it down.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews