4 Novels by Richard Wiley
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Overview: Richard Wiley is author of numerous stories and the novels Soldiers In Hiding (winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Best American Fiction), Fools’ Gold, Festival for Three Thousand Maidens, and Indigo. His most recent novel, Commodore Perry’s Minstrel Show, was published by the Michener Series at the University of Texas Press in 2007. His novel The Book of Important Moments will be published in the fall of 2013.
Genre: General Fiction/Classics
Ahmed’s Revenge: A Novel
The people in Richard Wiley’s fiction live in the dangerous territory where cultures and worlds collide. In Soldiers in Hiding, for which Richard Wiley won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Best American Fiction in 1987, the protagonist was Teddy Maki, a Japanese-American whose jazz band was playing in Tokyo at the moment Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Now, in his new novel, Ahmed’s Revenge, Wiley introduces us to Nora Grant, a young coffee farmer living in Kenya in the 1970s, a woman whose predicament is less obvious than Maki’s but no less dangerous.
Nora has disbelievingly stumbled upon her husband, Julius, engaged in what appears to be ivory smuggling, one of the Europeans’ dirtiest games. Before Nora can confront Julius, he is killed in accidental circumstances that soon look more like murder. Nora investigates her husband’s affairs, coming across a succession of people whose lives intertwine and intersect: her own father, living out his retirement in England in apparent innocence; Mr Smith, who might be a murderer; Mr N’Chele, who might be a smuggler; Miro, the opera singer; Detective Mubia, a policeman of divided loyalties–and Ahmed, a massive African elephant, whose remains are preserved at the National Museum in Nairobi and in whose name revenge must be sought.
Festival for Three Thousand Maidens
Festival for Three Thousand Maidens is set in the 1960s, the era of war in Vietnam and riots and assassinations in the US; however, neither of these places figure directly in the story, but both reverberate like distant thunder coming ever close to the heartbeat of this story.
Fools’ Gold
Fools’ Gold brings together a variegated cast of characters in one of the last outposts of the American frontier, Alaska, during the gold rush of the 1890s. They include Finn Wallace, an Irishman in his forties, nineteen years gone from his homeland, with ambitions to build a town… Ellen, a young Irishwoman, big-boned and quick to judge, the proprietor of the only bathhouse in Nome… Henriette, an American girl paid court by two surprising (and surprised) suitors… Kaneda, a Japanese prospector, who knows everything about gold but nothing about English, and who recites, for anyone who will listen all he knows of the history of Japan… Fujino, Kaneda’s assistant and translator… John Hummel, a scurvy man who discovers gold on the beach and is murderously angry when his claim is denied… the Revered Raymond, a preacher so inspired by story that his sermons escape him, creating characters unknown to the Bible (such as Andrew the Suicidal)… and Phil, an Eskimo who sees all the others as outsiders, and yet who recognizes in Kaneda much that is familiar, even if he cannot understand a single word the prospector says. Over the course of a few wintry months, they all make vital discoveries, some precious beyond the riches they came to find.
Indigo
Richard Wiley’s fourth novel is a richly layered exploration of cultural awareness, moral conflict and racial identity. Set in Nigeria during four eventful weeks in 1983, Indigo portrays a country stalled at a crossroads, with two factions competing to determine which will oust an inept civilian government. On one side is a cabal of military officers, on the other a group of idealistic nationalists led by a charismatic intellectual from a remote village. But for Dr. Jerry Neal, the white, middle-aged widower from the United States who is the principal of a private international school in Lagos, this offstage jockeying is something he does not learn about until a series of nightmarish events penetrates his previously orderly world. Neal is charged with a crime that has clearly been fabricated to create an international incident. Released on his own recognizance after several unspeakable days in confinement, he attempts to flee the country, only to be drawn farther into the unfolding drama. A brief sojourn in the countryside with some remarkably eloquent dissidents leads to a bittersweet epiphany. And, as another bow toward Franz Kafka, there is even a metamorphosis of sorts. Mr. Wiley, who won the 1987 PEN/Faulkner Award for his first novel, Soldiers in Hiding, has used this new one to combine provocative themes with solid storytelling. The result is a memorable work.
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