The Road to Wanting

(Paperback)

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Description

A startlingly fresh story of a young woman's reluctant homecoming, longlisted for the Orange Prize for fiction 2011. Sometimes the hardest journey is the road home.Na Ga was always in search of a better life. But now she sits, alone, in a hotel room in Wanting, a godforsaken town on the Chinese-Burmese border. Plucked from her wild life as a rural eel-catcher, Na Ga is then abandoned by her would-be rescuers in Rangoon. Later, as a teenager, she finds herself chasing the dream of a new life in Thailand - where further betrayals and violations await. Yet it seems that her fighting spirit will not be broken.But for how long can Na Ga belong nowhere and with no one In the dingy hotel in Wanting she is forced to confront her compulsion to keep running, and to ask herself why, until now, she's resisted the journey home.Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2011.

Reviews

Wendy Law-Yone does not merely report on a lost world: she recreates it in words for our benefit. In a clear-cut style, lucid and poetic, she offers us the experience of loss, learning and redemption. The Road to Wanting is a hauntingly beautiful book -- Alberto Manguel
Sheds garish light on the world of shadows and misery in which Burma's abused minorities live * Independent *
Poetic... engaging...full of witty observations, dialogue and characterisations * Bookmunch *
One of those books that you look back on and wonder how so much has happened in such a few pages. I think the last book that made me want to reach into its pages and rescue the main character to quite this extent was Tess of the D'Urbervilles... powerful. [Na Ga] is a character that will stay with me for a long time * www.bookbag.co.uk *

Author Bio

Wendy Law-Yone was born in Mandalay, Burma, and grew up in Rangoon, where her father founded the leading English-language daily, The Nation. Wendy was exiled to the United States where she published two novels, The Coffin Tree and Irrawaddy Tango, before her move to the UK following a David T.K. Wong creative writing fellowship at the University of East Anglia. She lives in London and Rye.