Back in March, before my blogging took a back seat to life for a half a year, you may well remember that my first (as yet unpublished) novel Kanako’s Foreigner had made it into the quarter finals of the Amazon.com Breakthrough Novel Award.
What I forgot to tell you – and something I have to admit I’m pretty proud of – is that after that, it reached the semi-finals, too. That means that out of the thousands of novels submitted (they don’t say how many, but the limit was 10,000), mine was in the top 100. And people (or at least one person) actually read the whole thing. Amazing, hey! In fact, I have a review from Publishers Weekly that I can quote:
A lyrical portrait of an Australian woman’s self-discovery in Japan, this manuscript is brilliant in its sensory details, though flawed in its ability to evoke well-rounded characters. Set shortly after 9/11, the novel centers on Lisa, who moves to Japan and takes a job at an English-language school. Lisa is soon crushed out on a woman named Kanako, a student and dentist who rescues Lisa from a severe toothache. The two begin spending time together, though it seems Kanako is more interested in having a foreign friend as a status symbol than in a genuine friendship. Subplots include the story of Hiromi, a recent college graduate who takes a job at the language school in order to get a foreign boyfriend, and Yoko, a student preparing to marry her aloof boyfriend. The book provides excellent imagery, and the descriptions of the Japanese food are enough to make a reader’s mouth water. Though the author fails to make clear what Lisa finds so compelling about the vaguely drawn Kanako, readers with a fondness for ex-pat or fish-out-of-water stories will find much to enjoy.
It’s really weird to read somebody else’s summary of my novel, but it all sounds quite fair – and the criticisms are especially useful. And it was quite an ego buzz to get selected for the Top 100, I have to admit. Not long after that, I started to work through the novel and rewrite some parts, a project that has now been abandoned for a few months, but one that I’m about to get back into.
If you’re curious, you can still download the first chapter or two of Kanako’s Foreigner from Amazon – and it’s free – just surf over to ABNA – Kanako’s Foreigner and you can download the extract from Amazon Shorts. On the other hand, perhaps you should wait until you can buy the whole novel – it might be substantially different to what you read there.
, is a well-deserved winner (and if you haven’t read it, make sure you do before you see the movie).
, which I always considered 
shows up at #73, which pleases me, a big Murakami fan. (I swallowed his fiction collection practically whole while I was living in Japan, where more of it seemed to make more sense!)
, to appear at #54. If you’re a punctuation stickler like me but haven’t read this, it’s a must. I read it on commuter buses in southern Germany and laughed out loud multiple times, a real no-no on a German bus, yet I was grateful for the fact that my fellow passengers wouldn’t have realised I was reading what essentially is a book about grammar. But a really, really funny one.
by Sebastian Barry, whose lilting accent I fell in love with earlier this year at the 
is at #25, just behind Kazuo Ishiguro’s 
, an excellent book I read just a few months back, at #24.
