The Road to Wanting

A startlingly fresh story of a young woman's reluctant homecoming, longlisted for the Orange Prize for fiction 2011.

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

Sheds garish light on the world of shadows and misery in which Burma's abused minorities live

Poetic... engaging...full of witty observations, dialogue and characterisations

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

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.

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.

Wendy Law-Yone

Magnificent... Delivers a riveting experience

Beautifully written with a keen sense of humour, the book is bound to be a classic

Gorgeous: vivid, precise and awash in remembered sunlight

A full and fascinating account of Burma’s turbulent post-independence history

A Daughter’s Memoir of Burma

‘Die, and it’s the vile earth; live, and it’s the golden parasol,’ 
 went the old Burmese saying. Why not aim for the pinnacle 
 with everything they had? 
 The vile earth would be theirs soon enough. 
 
 A year after Burma’s military coup in 1962, Ed Law-Yone, daredevil proprietor of the influential newspaper, The Nation, was arrested and his newspaper shut down. 
 Eventually, his teenaged daughter Wendy was also imprisoned before managing to escape the country. 
 
 Ed spent five years as a political prisoner, but the moment he was freed he set about trying – unsuccessfully – to stage a revolution, and never gave up hope for the restoration of democracy in Burma. Exiled in America, he died disappointed – though not before entrusting to his daughter Wendy his papers and unpublished memoirs: of a career that had spanned the full sweep of modern Burmese history – from colonial rule to independence; from the era of parliamentary democracy to the military coup that would usher in decades of totalitarian rule. 
 
 Now, some forty years later, as Burma enters another period of transition, Wendy Law-Yone has honoured her father’s legacy by setting his remarkable career in a larger, more personal, story. The result is Golden Parasol, a unique portrait of a patriot, his family, and a nation whose vicissitudescontinue to intrigue the world.

Wendy Law-Yone

Praise for Golden Parasol

Captivating

Magnificent... Delivers a riveting experience

Beautifully written with a keen sense of humour, the book is bound to be a classic

Captivating

Magnificent... Delivers a riveting experience

Beautifully written with a keen sense of humour, the book is bound to be a classic

Captivating

Magnificent... Delivers a riveting experience

Beautifully written with a keen sense of humour, the book is bound to be a classic

Books by Wendy Law-Yone

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