Others Were Emeralds

Poet Leav makes her adult fiction debut in this heartrending novel about how one Asian Australian’s insecurities influence her relationships . . . Leav skillfully captures the details of senior-year high school life, but is even better in depicting Ai’s parents’ stories of surviving war and persecution and Ai’s teenage experiences with microaggressions and outward racism. It’s a resonant portrayal of how paranoia and jealousy can turn relationships sour.

Publisher's Weekly

Leav’s coming-of-age debut is poetic and lyrical, her prose rich in beautiful imagery. She tenderly explores grief, trauma, and love as Ai reflects on her past and makes sense of it in order to move forward.

Booklist

In a similar vein to Western Sydney writers Shirley Le, Tracey Lien and Vivian Pham, Leav seamlessly inhabits the painful experience of growing up in a community only ever reflected as a ‘rolling montage of drugs, chronic unemployment, and gang violence’ in the media.'

Sonia Nair, Books + Publishing

Leav writes the teenage experience in all its complex glory . . . her writing is imbued with poeticism from description to dialogue . . . If you’re interested in a read that manages to cover the varied themes of first love, grief, racism, friendship, war, jealousy, and art with care and honesty, I would definitely recommend this book.

Olivia Hurley, Readings

Poet and novelist Lang Leav (Sad Girls) weaves a delicate, moving coming-of-age tale set in ’90s Australia, when anti-immigrant sentiment resulted in the rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. Growing up in the melting pot of Whitlam, Ai is the daughter of Cambodian refugees who fled the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime. The past still lingers in whispers, but Ai is an ordinary adolescent looking to the future . . . Leav layers shadows of the horrors Ai’s parents fled, the immediacy of teen characters in their final year at high school, and a mature, poetic reflection on innocence and traumatic experience.

Cameron Woodhead and Fiona Capp, Sydney Morning Herald