Book Description

The Red Pearl and Other Stories is an invitation from an idiosyncratic but endearing bunch of misfits and outsiders to travel to emotional sites just beyond our GPS coordinates. Welcome to Kuala Lumpur, Paris, Namche Bazaar - but also to unnamed, weirdly recognizable spaces of desire, anxiety or nightmare. Here, race riots unfold in 1960s Malaysia; an 'Asian' student faces 'Go home' graffiti on incessant train rides around Sydney; dogs in love twirl and tumble in the high mountains of Nepal. Here, too, is the parallel Gothic world of the Shanghai Bar, where an Orientalist seductress bites back; and the concrete world of expatriate Kuala Lumpur where Dragon Princes and spirit travellers can also be found. Here is a vision of Sydney at its mythical best: golden, shaded in jacaranda blossoms and offering benevolent asylum to an array of newcomers and old hands. Moving between genres and cultures, the stories in this collection capture moments of intensity and yearning, points of turbulence or rest in the lives of characters who inhabit a globalised world. Their quest is for new arrangements of family, home, friendship and workplaces; new ways of living and loving in a rapidly changing world. The Red Pearl and Other Stories is award-winning novelist Beth Yahp's first collection of short stories. "Beth Yahp is one of the finest contemporary writers and an important voice from the Asia-Pacific region. She is a rich and accomplished stylist--something unusual in Australian writing--an enticing storyteller and a deft conjurer of marvellous complex worlds, part real, part remembered or imagined. Yahp's settings range widely--Kuala Lumpur, Sydney, Paris--as do her characters, whose stories reach far back in time as the protagonists in successive generations traverse extraordinary personal and social change. They are travellers, writers, lovers, sailors, ancestors, young women stepping out into the world and remaking themselves, often under pressure and in the face of societal hostility. Like the sailor in 'The Red Pearl', this author is 'voluptuous with the stories in [her] head'. In this collection she shares those stories with the reader, with a high degree of art, innovation and witty, passionate critique. She has an exceptional capacity for revealing observation and detail. Publication of Beth Yahp's stories in book form in the ideal context of Vagabond Press promises to introduce her to a new generation of readers, many of them young people who are themselves experiencing the issues of identity, dislocation and divided belonging that the author explores." - Nicholas Jose