The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan
The hunger for this astronomically anticipated debut novel from Vanessa Chan is seemingly insatiable. I can confirm: expect to be swept away from the first sentence. Ten years after Japan’s WWII invasion of Malaya (which wouldn’t be called Malaysia until 1963), Cecily Alcantara’s family is on the verge of catastrophe. Her 15-year-old son, Abel, disappears, along with a number of other teenage boys; her older daughter, Jujube, works at a teahouse frequented by abrasive soldiers; and her youngest, eight-year-old Jasmin, resents her parents for confining her to the basement lest she gets caught and forced into service at a “comfort station.”
Cecily knows the perils that threaten to destroy her family are her fault—and that she must do anything to save them from the consequences of her actions, spurred by one fateful night 10 years prior, in 1934. A low-level administrator for the British occupation at the time, her husband, Gordon, has a work party one night, where Cecily comes into contact with a man who introduces himself as Bingley Chan and who claims to be a merchant from Hong Kong. He becomes a quick friend of the family under this guise, but Cecily soon discovers his true identity: He is actually General Shigeru Fujiwara of the Japanese Imperial Army.
Soon she is inveigled into plans to undermine the British and build “an Asia for Asians” by handing over intel stolen from Gordon’s desk. Her life of espionage continues for a few more years until the horrors of the Japanese invasion reach a brutal apex in 1945, which could cost her everything. The Storm We Made bears the full weight of war and the endless costs that comes with it, but is so triumphant in its depiction of survival, it soars.



















