Sarah Cypher

This is a big year for Audrey Niffenegger. Scribner bought the rights to her second novel, “Her Fearful Symmetry,” for a reported $4.8 million — a huge vote of confidence in her ability to bring the book out from the shadow of her first novel, “The Time Traveler’s Wife.”

At first, “Her Fearful Symmetry” seems to succeed. Niffenegger portrays romantic love without crossing into either triteness or cynicism; in a short prologue, a man discovers that his beloved, Elspeth Noblin, has succumbed to cancer while he was getting tea from the hospital drink machine. He puts the tea aside and lies next to her. The scene is poignant, simple and says all that can be said about grief.

Read more. (From The Oregonian, September 27, 2009.)

In her sixth novel, “Shanghai Girls,” Lisa See returns to historical China — for her, familiar terrain. This time she begins in 1937 Shanghai, the “Paris of Asia,” in its splendid, unsuspecting weeks before the Japanese invasion. See, who has already written two best-sellers about women who chafe against tradition, now explores a slightly different frontier of the same idea — what traditions we reject while at home but reclaim as exiles.

May and Pearl are “beautiful girls,” the Shanghai version of fashion models. They are also sisters, and when their Westernized father surprises them by arranging their marriages to pay off a gambling debt, they believe that their futures have been rewritten by a fool. Yet when the Japanese destroy Shanghai and all bets for the future are off, they find themselves compelled into a new destiny — fleeing the city, facing rape, starvation and terror. They find passage to America, where their new husbands await them.

Read more. (From The Oregonian, June 12, 2009.)