Others Were Emeralds (Lang Leav, Viking)

The year is 1997—the era of Jerry Maguire and Scream, dial-up modems, and rising anti-Asian sentiment in the heavily politicised Australian town of Whitlam. Poet Lang Leav’s debut novel revolves around a tight-knit group of friends—introspective, creative Ai; mercurial, brilliant Brigitte; affable high-school sweetheart Bowie; and inscrutable, kind Tin—as their lives and group are cleaved in two by a senseless, tragic incident. Others Were Emeralds is rich with lush descriptions and an unmistakeable sense of place, from baguettes ‘baked fresh each morning with crackling, paper-thin crust giving way to the fluffy, light-as-air interior’ to Whitlam with its ‘chain-link fences and overgrown lawns strewn with junk and burnt-out cars’. In a similar vein to Western Sydney writers Shirley Le, Tracey Lien and Vivian Pham, Leav seamlessly inhabits the painful experience of growing up in a community only ever reflected as a ‘rolling montage of drugs, chronic unemployment, and gang violence’ in the media. But there’s a beautiful specificity in Leav’s evocation of life as a second-generation Cambodian-Australian, from the way Ai’s mother switches between Teochew, Mandarin and broken English to the chive cakes Ai exchanges for her classmate’s stuffed vine leaves. The novel, demarcated into two parts, has a portentous air as Ai walks through the corridors of her memories for closure, where the accretion of seemingly insignificant moments suddenly collapses in one big crescendo.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Sonia Nair is a Melbourne-based writer and critic. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Category: Reviews