Author(s): Madeleine Thien

World fiction

Gail Lim, a producer of radio documentaries in present-day Vancouver, finds herself haunted by events in her parents' past in war torn Malaysia, a past which remains a mystery that fiercely grips her imagination. Gail's father, Matthew, grew up under the terrifying shadow of war in Japanese-occupied Sanddakan where he witnessed his father being shot by the soldiers with whom he had collaborated. Vivid, profound and written in understated yet powerful prose, Certainty is a novel about the legacies of loss, the dislocations of war, the redemptive qualities of love and the evanescence of any kind of certainty.