Original prin

Review by New York Times Review

AMERICAN MOONSHOT: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race, by Douglas Brinkley. (Harper/ HarperCollins, $35.) In his study of the politics behind Apollo ll's launch, Brinkley fits the space program into a wider American social context. He also asks whether the program was worth the tens of billions it cost, and argues that for its technological advances alone, it was. ORIGINAL PRIN, by Randy Boyagoda. (John Metcalf/Biblioasis, paper, $14.95.) This highly original novel traces an unexceptional professor's path to becoming a suicide bomber. The comedy of literary and cultural references involves unfunny matters like cancer, a crisis of faith and Islamic terrorism, as well as easier comic subjects like juice-box fatherhood and academia. BIG SKY, by Kate Atkinson. (Little, Brown, $28.) After a nine-year absence, Atkinson's laconic private eye, Jackson Brodie, returns to deliver his idiosyncratic brand of justice to crime victims in a case involving human trafficking. THE PLAZA: The Secret Life of America's Most Famous Hotel, by Julie Satow. (Twelve, $29.) Satow's gossip-stuffed tale traces the history of one of New York's most iconic landmarks, the imposing white chateau at the corner of 59th and Fifth. THE WHITE DEVILS DAUGHTERS: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco's Chinatown, by Julia Flynn Siler. (Knopf, $28.95.) From the Gold Rush to the 1930s, a sex slave trade flourished in San Francisco's Chinatown. Siler's colorful history includes portraits of the determined women who helped thousands of Chinese girls escape to freedom. ORANGE WORLD: And Other Stories, by Karen Russell. (Knopf, $25.95.) Florida is the original or adopted home of some of America's most inventive fiction writers, Russell prominent among them. Her new collection is a feat of literary alchemy, channeling her home state's weirdness into unexpectedly affecting fantastical scenarios and landscapes. STRANGERS AND COUSINS, by Leah Hager Cohen. (Riverhead, $27.) Cheerful and lively, Cohen's new novel - set at an anarchic family gathering in rural New York - packs a lot of themes into its satisfyingly simple frame. As in a Shakespearean comedy, disparate relationships are resolved and familial love prevails. WAR AND PEACE: FDR's Final Odyssey, D-Day to Yalta, 19431945, by Nigel Hamilton. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30.) The final volume in the "F.D.R. at War" trilogy presents a heroic Roosevelt fending off myopic advisers to lead the Allies to victory. ASSAD OR WE BURN THE COUNTRY: How One Family's Lust for Power Destroyed Syria, by Sam Dagher. (Little, Brown, $29.) Dagher draws on history, interviews and his own experience as a reporter in Syria to depict an utterly ruthless regime. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 30, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

Canadian writer Boyagoda's ambitious new novel takes on academia, religion, politics, terrorism, international business, and immigrant identity as he tells the story of Prin, an English professor in a Catholic university in Toronto. Boyagoda gives us much to laugh at as he skewers holy cows, even as Prin deals with a diagnosis of early-stage pancreatic cancer. Prin struggles with the decision to travel to Dragomans, a fictional Middle Eastern country, to help with his employer's financial situation, revealing his shaky spirituality. His Sri Lankan immigrant parents, wife Molly, four daughters, and ex-girlfriend Wende are among the many people who populate his world and add layers and texture to the story. Prin, however, remains front and center as Boyagoda delivers a winning combination of academic satire and sociopolitical commentary that leaves readers facing grim reality and acknowledging the irrationality of it all. Globally aware and witty, this is the opening title in a projected trilogy and a tale that offers a fascinating new perspective on journeys of faith and contemporary intellectual pursuits.--Shoba Viswanathan Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Canadian academic and novelist Boyagoda (Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square, 2015, etc.) skewers the corporatized university and modern-world politics alike in this delicious satire.Princely St. John Umbiligoda teaches English at a college once called Holy Family College until the faculty "expressed concern that the school was becoming increasingly irrelevant and too Catholic-seeming," whereupon it became the University of the Family Universal, or UFU. (Say the initials aloud.) That didn't help the fiscal situation, and the school is now teetering on bankruptcy. That's just the beginning of Prin's troubles. He's not particularly happily married, he's not well-paid, his work as a specialist in "marine life in the Canadian literary landscape" isn't setting the world on fire, and though only 40 he's battling prostate cancer. When a Chinese developer called The Nephew comes along with a plan to bail out the school, it's to make himself a fortune by leveraging the resources of a faraway Middle Eastern nation called Dragomans: UFU will become a retirement home for the well-to-do, and its Dragomans branch will train students to become caretakers with "diplomasin Eldercare Studies," as Prin's girlfriend, who's in on the deal, reveals, with the students then coming to Toronto "for internships at the condominium The Nephew is going to build on your campus." Teaching The English Patient far from home has its attractions, and so does that erstwhile girlfriend, but politics complicates the picturepolitics academic and worldly, and economics, and sex, and culture clashes, and good old-fashioned terrorism. Boyagoda's novel careens to an untidy, violent end with plenty of unresolved questions, which makes it a good thing that it's supposed to be the first installment of a trilogy. Messy though it may be, it's a lot of funand you can't help but read on when opening a book that begins, "Eight months before he became a suicide bomber, Prin went to the zoo with his family."A lively complement to Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim, Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man, Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys, and other academic sendups. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Excerpt from Original Prin Eight months before he became a suicide bomber, Prin went to the zoo with his family. Puffy and brightly balaclava'd, the six of them fanned across an empty parking lot. Ahead of them was a billboard advertising the zoo's newest additions. Two furry gifts from China snuggled in the smiling Prime Minister's lap, chewing bamboo shoots that pointed in perilous directions. Prin experienced a sympathetic twinge in his own groin. This was the day to tell them. "The baby panda bears are turning into polar bears!" said his six-year old, Maisie. "That's just snow sticking to the picture," said his ten-year old, Philomena. "That's called climate change," said his eight-year old, Chiara. "I won't eat them!" said his four-year old, Pippa. "Who wants a snack?" asked his wife, Molly. He strode out in front, the family food-bag slung across his back. It was lunchtime, and they hadn't eaten since sort-of-an-hour before the Mass they'd attended at a plaster-walled church on the rusty eastern edge of the city. The church was fronted by chipped saints' shrines and wedges of stumpy evergreen shrubs. Everything was fretted in winter road salt. The church was surrounded by an endless run of ethnic food stores and hair salons and paycheck advance shops, by mid-rise apartments and crime scene hotels and diners for old white people. Inside, almost everyone was poor and South Asian. Prin's own parents had come from Sri Lanka in the 1960s. His father had worked downtown, eighty hours a week, and raised him far from the city, in a suburban paradise of flavored coffee and televisions in every bedroom and streets named for fruit and kings and no other brown people. Whereas, at a church like St. Teresa's, in deep Scarborough, the people had gone up to communion in sincere moustaches and dark, dismal suits, in wedding gold and bright crimson saris that flowed into snow boots. The little girls wore braids past their waists. The boys wore quickly-hemmed dress pants over Lebron James-endorsed basketball shoes. Everyone had sideburns. Everyone was singing folks hymns to Mother Mary and her baby, songs that cut the heart. He took his family to this church once a year, on January 1, in an aging Volvo with a trunk full of emergency supplies -- road flares, iPad chargers, unread New Yorkers -- and also the gingham grocery store bag that he was now carrying into the zoo, his family debating pandas and polar bears behind him, his wife asking him to slow down so everyone could have a snack. The bag was full of bananas and avocados and also a St. Sebastian's cranberry-and-spelt loaf that Molly had baked that morning. At the bottom of the bag was a champagne-foiled sparking juice bottle, which, in keeping with family tradition, they'd brought to toast the lemurs at the zoo on New Year's Day. Which was, this year, also the day to tell them. This is why they had come, in spite of the weather and Prin's father calling to remind him that morning that the Chinese now owned Volvo. Would you trust the lives of your children to car tires made by Falun Gong prisoners? To car tires probably made of Falun Gong prisoners? His father was divorced, had sold his convenience store in the inner city to a condo developer, subscribed to a premium alternative news package, and had a lot of time to think and forward emails. Prin was going in for surgery later that January, and he and Molly had decided to stop calling it just a potty problem. The plan was to take the girls to one of the more obscure exhibits and explain it there and leave it there, in a place they would never visit again. Girls, something awful is growing inside your daddy. It's called cancer, and it looks like this: Mole rats: blind, pink, splotchy, writhing, they lived in a stacked complex of glass tubes. Their lives were spent crawling and squeezing over each other, their dull plump shapes pulsing and proliferating in low light. Who wouldn't want a very careful doctor with a super-powerful robot assistant to cut all of these gross and pointless bodies out of their beloved zoo, their beloved daddy? They would ask: would he bleed like when he was shaving and yelling that they were late for church? What does prostate cancer look like? Does it bite? Excerpted from Original Prin by Randy Boyagoda All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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