Waiting on Wednesday

(First paragraph from wishfuledings.com blog)

Can't-Wait Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted here, at Wishful Endings, to spotlight and discuss the books we're excited about that we have yet to read. Generally they're books that have yet to be released. It's based on Waiting on Wednesday, hosted by the fabulous Jill at Breaking the Spine. If you're continuing with WOW, feel free to link those up as well! Find out more here.

First of all, Happy New Years everyone! And happy new decade! For better or worse, the teen decade of 2000s is over, and we moved on to the twenties decade, which I hope will provide the world with stability it desperately needs. I also hope that my bookish and non-bookish will also come true during this decade. 

This is my first 2020 bookish meme, and it seemed right to fall on Wednesday, which means it's time for 'Can't Wait Wednesday' which means excitement over the books I am excited about coming out. I've long debated to see what books I will use, and at the end decided to use A Hundred Suns by Karin Tanabe and The Lover by Marguerite Duras. I will explain why in just a moment. 

The first book is A Hundred Suns by Karin Tanabe which, I believe, describes the Vietnam of 1930s and of wealthy families. On goodreads I also read that the book is descriptive of plantations on Vietnam and the treatment experienced by Vietnamese natives. This tale deals with wealth, betrayal and politics and it doesn't take place during Vietnam War. 

The second book is titled The Lover by Marguerite Duras. Marguerite Duras has also spent her girlhood years in Vietnam, which heavily influenced her writings. She is particularly notorious for The Lover, which is about a young teen girl of French descent having an amorous relationship with a much older Chinese male. I have read the companion book to The Lover, The North China Lover which she fills in more, or so I have read. But yes, I hadn't read The Lover. 

The link between the two novels? Life in Vietnam during 1930s and vivid descriptions of how both natives and non-Vietnamese lived during that time. I also think I like the whole possible Vietnamese male/Caucasian female angle that A Hundred Suns by Karin Tanabe will portray. 

A Hundred Suns by Karin Tanabe

Published Date: April 7th, 2020

(From Goodreads) An evocative historical novel set in 1930's Indochine, about the American wife of a Michelin heir who journeys to the French colony in the name of family fortune, and the glamorous, tumultuous world she finds herself in—and the truth she may be running from.

On a humid afternoon in 1933, American Jessie Lesage steps off a boat from Paris and onto the shores of Vietnam. Accompanying her French husband Victor, an heir to the Michelin rubber fortune, she’s certain that their new life is full of promise, for while the rest of the world is sinking into economic depression, Indochine is gold for the Michelins. Jessie knows that their vast plantations near Saigon are the key to the family’s prosperity, and while they have been marred in scandal, she needs them to succeed for her husband’s sake—and to ensure that her trail of secrets stays hidden in the past.

Jessie dives into the glamorous colonial world, where money is king and morals are brushed aside, and meets Marcelle de Fabry, a spellbinding French woman with a moneyed Indochinese lover, the silk tycoon Khoi Nguyen. Descending on Jessie’s world like a hurricane, Marcelle proves to be an exuberant guide to ex-pat life. But hidden beneath her vivacious exterior is a fierce desire to put the colony back in the hands of its people, starting with the Michelin plantations, fueled by a terrible wrong committed against her and Khoi’s loved ones in Paris.

Yet it doesn’t take long for the sun-drenched days and champagne-soaked nights to catch up with Jessie. With an increasingly fractured mind, her affection for Indochine falters. And as a fiery political struggle builds around her, Jessie begins to wonder what’s real in a friendship that she suspects may be nothing but a house of cards.

Motivated by love, driven by ambition, and seeking self-preservation at all costs, Jessie and Marcelle each toe the line between friend and foe, ethics and excess. Cast against the stylish backdrop of 1930s Indochine, in a time and place defined by contrasts and convictions, A Hundred Suns is historical fiction at its lush, suspenseful best.

The Lover by Marguerite Duras

Published Date: 1984 

(From Goodreads) Set in the prewar Indochina of Marguerite Duras’s childhood, this is the haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her Chinese lover. In spare yet luminous prose, Duras evokes life on the margins of Saigon in the waning days of France’s colonial empire, and its representation in the passionate relationship between two unforgettable outcasts.

Which of these do you find exciting and are more likely to get?