What is Tiffany Tsao reading?

Featured at Writers Reads: Tiffany Tsao, author of The Majesties.

Her entry begins:

I read Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay’s novel Abandon over Christmas. It was one of the most tragic and disturbing stories I’ve read in a long time. The book defies so many of the clichés and expectations about how we think mothers should act and behave. And it exposes the unrealistic burdens that are imposed on mothers even when they are deprived of any genuine compassion or aid. What the protagonist’s son, Roo, suffers as a result is especially heartbreaking and unsettling to the core. As a literary translator, I was incredibly impressed by...[read on]

About The Majesties, from the publisher:

In this riveting tale about the secrets and betrayals that can accompany exorbitant wealth, two sisters from a Chinese-Indonesian family grapple with the past after one of them poisons their entire family.

Gwendolyn and Estella have always been as close as sisters can be. Growing up in a wealthy, eminent, and sometimes deceitful family, they’ve relied on each other for support and confidence. But now Gwendolyn is lying in a coma, the sole survivor of Estella’s poisoning of their whole clan.

As Gwendolyn struggles to regain consciousness, she desperately retraces her memories, trying to uncover the moment that led to this shocking and brutal act. Was it their aunt’s mysterious death at sea? Estella’s unhappy marriage to a dangerously brutish man? Or were the shifting loyalties and unspoken resentments at the heart of their opulent world too much to bear? Can Gwendolyn, at last, confront the carefully buried mysteries in their family’s past and the truth about who she and her sister really are?

Traveling from the luxurious world of the rich and powerful in Indonesia to the most spectacular shows at Paris Fashion Week, from the sunny coasts of California to the melting pot of Melbourne’s university scene, The Majesties is a haunting and deeply evocative novel about the dark secrets that can build a family empire—and also bring it crashing down.

Visit Tiffany Tsao's website.

Writers Reads: Tiffany Tsao.

--Marshal Zeringue