The necessary trap

There’s a joke that comes up in westerns about the book that saves: a thick volume in the chest pocket that takes a bullet. Bem Le Hunte introduces her second novel about a small band of World War II refugees: ‘This book was written as a prayer for those people who could not live to tell their tales. It was written, too, as a prayer for the future of our world, in the hope that stories like this have the power to save us.’ Certainly, this is a book that teaches hope against the odds, but when you consider how human cruelty has survived even the greatest stories, Le Hunte’s prayer sounds forlorn – unless she was thinking of saving us from boredom, in which case both There, Where the Pepper Grows and Hsu-Ming Teo’s Behind the Moon work most effectively.

In their first novels, both Le Hunte and Teo range across continents and generations, telling sagas that test the meaning of family, of heritage and inheritance. Now, in their second novels, they test the meaning of family against the other bond that makes independence a form of betrayal: the shared history of survivors. But they choose very different battlegrounds.