The Caprices - by Sabina Murray (Paperback)

About the Book

From an acclaimed young author of Filipino background comes a history of the Pacific Campaign of World War II, told through individual lives. Her accomplished stories depict a savage war and the lives that it altered.

Book Synopsis

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner award for fiction in 2003, The Caprices is a collection of stories artfully told across the theatre of the Pacific Campaign of World War II. An Anglo-Indian cavalryman, his homeland on the brink of revolution, finds himself in Malaysia fighting to protect British interests. Two soldiers lost in the jungle with a Japanese prisoner confront their prejudices toward each other, and the nature of being American. An island witnesses the passing of history from Magellan, to Amelia Earhart, to the dropping of the atomic bomb. With exquisite lyricism tempered by a journalist's eye for detail, Murray shines light on the tangle of battles created by that conflict, the violent reach across the generations, the shattering reverberations in memory. With this collection, Sabina Murray established herself as a passionate and wise voice of literary fiction.

Review Quotes

[Murray] turns the bombed-out and broken setting of World War II into a theater for humankind, where weakness and grace are writ large.

Murray crafts her pieces as series of snapshots...that alternately zoom to details and step back for panoramic historical sweeps.

Murray has marshalled searing prose to construct tales of faith (more often than not unwarranted), courage and savagery.

Sania Murray's stories about colonialism and war glitter with juxtapositions.

The two notions of war as another planet and of cognitive displacement are endered with chance timing and shocking force...

War is an unusual subject for a young female writer; with each piece, Murray proves to be increasingly exceptional.

"The Caprices" grapples with regrettably marginalized but extraordinarily significant events of World WarII...[Murray} fuse[s] together the ordinary and incomprehensible.