The Size of the World

About men and women all over the world whose jolting encounters with the unfamiliar force them to realize how many “riffs there are to being human.”

Travelers, colonials, immigrants, and returned ex-pats meet or pass one another in narratives spanning lifetimes. In the book’s opening, an engineer in Vietnam is shaken to discover why his company’s planes are getting lost. A modern marriage between a Thai Muslim and an American woman leads to a terrible family fight. In 1920s Siam a young woman experiences the colonial stance of her tin-prospecting brother. The last section returns the brother to the States, older now but ever in love with Asian women. Love, loss, yearning, self-delusion, and forgiveness are here … and in the tradition of E. M. Forster, seeing the size of the world changes the meaning of home-sickness for all the characters. (from Goodreads)

More reading

The Size of the World – by Joan Silber – on Goodreads

JoanSilber.net – author website

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Unless otherwise noted, the blurb is adapted from Goodreads.
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