The Albatross (Nina Wan, Macmillan)

It’s widely known that an albatross is a very rare bird. In golf, it’s a move that’s even rarer—one that’s considered lucky, executed with the utmost finesse. And golf is the sport that Nina Wan’s debut novel The Albatross revolves around: main character Primrose Li finds herself drawn to the green as she wrestles with many uncertainties—her selfhood, her marriage and the shadow of her past. Her husband Adrian is finally on an upward turn after being diagnosed with cancer, yet recurrence always appears to be on the horizon. Their daughter Bebe is kept oblivious. For Primrose, a financial journalist turned stay-at-home-mum, golf ends up being a kind of solo solace. Beneath this newfound hobby is a longing for a first love, whom she lost contact with after he went overseas after high school. He now lives with his wife across the street. Wan sets up these relationships such that they are deceptively warm, yet underlying quandaries are close by. Written with a wry, subdued sense of humour, The Albatross is reminiscent of Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise and Katie Kitamura’s A Separation—’cultural authenticity’ is never forced, yet the characters’ positionalities quietly assert their way throughout the book. A mesmerising comedy of manners that interrogates the frictions of migrant upward mobility as well as the unspoken tensions between diasporic generations, The Albatross is a feat of a first novel.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Cher Tan is a writer in Melbourne. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Category: Reviews