Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2013.
Winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize 2012.
It's Malaya, 1949. After studying law at Cambrige and time spent helping to prosecute Japanese war criminals, Yun Ling Teoh seeks solace among the jungle fringed plantations of Northern Malaya where she grew up as a child. There she discovers Yugiri, the only Japanese garden in Malaya, and its owner and creator, the enigmatic Aritomo.
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012.
Maya Jaggi, Chair of the Man Asian Literary Prize judges, said: "The winner, The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng, revisits the traumatic aftermath of the Japanese occupation of Malaya, and the post-war insurgency against British rule, with stylistic poise and probing intelligence. Taking its aesthetic cues from the artful deceptions of Japanese landscape gardening, it opens up a startling perspective on converging histories, using the feints and twists of fiction to explore its themes of personal and national honour; love and atonement; memory and forgetting; and the disturbing co-existence of cultural refinement and barbarism."
Sir Peter Stothard, Chair of Man Booker Prize 2012 judging panel, on The Garden of Evening Mists...
'The Garden of Evening Mists is the second novel by the Malaysian writer, Tan Twan Eng, and is also from a discerning small publisher. In some of the most poised, precise prose offered to us this year, it is the story a Japanese garden created in honour of a Japanese victim of war - and is sternly paced to match its subject. One of us, I remember, likened its beauty to that of 'slowly clashing icebergs'. We all admired the serenity of the gardener, Aritomo, former servant of the Emperor, and one of the most memorable characters in all the 30,000 pages or so that we have read.'
| Primary Genre | Modern and Contemporary Fiction |
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