The author’s precise prose creates an immediacy of presence, trundling the reader along the immigrants’ desperate journey uphill and down as the four family members, harassed by dire circumstances and insurmountable uncertainty, fall prey to petty bickering and understandable stress. “Puffy little mountains of mosquito bites covered Abay’s face and arms and feet, every inch of skin that was visible, down to her soles. Her family, horrified, urges her to sleep while knowing it will be impossible:

Released the next day, she groans a “thin, high terrible” sound. Returning to the bus just minutes late after shopping, Abay is stripped naked and put into a prison cell teeming with mosquitoes. In our 21st-century world, where hundreds of thousands continue to take the hardscrabble road of flight to better their lives, this novel reflects the pathos and searing courage demanded of those who would start anew.Ī particularly graphic scene occurs when Firuzeh’s mother, her Abay, takes a refugee-camp bus to a nearby town to buy shoes for her daughter with money she has saved from the few coins paid for washing dishes in the camp. Around them, the other passengers wailed and prayed, their voices drowned out by the weltering water. A wave broke in pearls over the deck and hissed away. The smooth, untroubled water of the previous day now heaved and fumed. What had begun as a bruise along the horizon rapidly bled across the sky… “On their sixth day at sea, the typhoon came. The reader, like the listening children, becomes captive to the majesty of well-fashioned prose: Thus, with Yu’s careful handling of language, a fatal monsoon becomes a terrible - and, paradoxically beautiful - conquest of fear. Light touches are introduced as the parents weave indigenous myths and mystical tales of heroism into the family’s plight to inspire their children and soften their fright. The horrific events portrayed are made endurable by the author’s skillful use of characterization and poetic imagery. The family travels endless days filled with dread and numbing cultural indifference from others. The fictional journey juxtaposes the opposing poles of human emotion: doubt and faith, fear and comfort, hope and despair.

There, they become quarantined in a refugee tent camp, left to wait with faint hope that they might be granted permission to settle in nearby Australia. Lily Yu begins her poetic debut novel, On Fragile Waves, tracking a family’s migration from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Indonesia to Nauru, a small island country northeast of Australia. This is a sign: It’s time for the family - mother, father, sister, and brother - to flee alongside others seeking sanctuary in foreign lands. When the shooting stops, her father, her Atay, tentatively turns on the radio, and over its fragile soundwaves, he hears music. When Firuzeh is 6, fire falls from the sky over Kabul, and conversations among individuals must be confined to halting phrases between mortars.

E lily yu on fragile waves