About this item
Malaya, 1951. Yun Ling Teoh, the scarred lone survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp, seeks solace among the jungle-fringed tea plantations of Cameron Highlands. There she discovers Yugiri, the only Japanese garden in Malaya, and its owner and creator, the enigmatic Aritomo, exiled former gardener of the emperor of Japan. Despite her hatred of the Japanese, Yun Ling seeks to engage Aritomo to create a garden in memory of her sister, who died in the camp. Aritomo refuses but agrees to accept Yun Ling as his apprentice “until the monsoon comes.” Then she can design a garden for herself.As the months pass, Yun Ling finds herself intimately drawn to the gardener and his art, while all around them a communist guerilla war rages. But the Garden of Evening Mists remains a place of mystery.
About the Author
Tan Twan Eng was born in Penang, Malaysia. He lives in Kuala Lumpur.
The Gift of Rain, his first novel, was Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Greek, Hungarian, Russian, Romanian, Czech and Serbian.
His second and latest novel, The Garden of Evening Mists, was published in September 2012. It has been Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012. Boyd Tonkin in The Independent called it:
'an elegant and haunting novel of art and war and memory...Tan writes with breath-catching poise and grace, linguistic refinement and searching intelligence...His fictional garden cultivates formal harmony -but also undermines it. It unmasks sophisticated artistry as a partner of pain and lies. This duality invests the novel with a climate of doubt; a mood - as with Aritomo's creation - of "tension and possibility". Its beauty never comes to rest.'
It has been translated/will be translated into German, French, Italian, Serbian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish, Hungarian, Macedonian, Taiwanese Chinese, Indonesian, Korean, Russian, and Norwegian.
The Garden of Evening Mists won the Man Asian Literary Prize in March 2013.
In June it won the Walter Scott Prize 2013, from a shortlist of authors which included Hilary Mantel, Rose Tremain, Thomas Keneally, Pat Barker and Anthony Quinn.
The Garden of Evening Mists was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2014.
