An immersive reading experience

Allison Alsup’s debut novel FOREIGN SEED accomplishes a rare balance in fiction: beautiful, lyrical writing that transported me to another time and place AND a propulsive plot that kept me turning the pages and reading long past my bedtime.

After a perfect opening chapter, I was hooked. The characters are tightly drawn and three-dimensional (even the secondary characters) and the unfolding action, setting descriptions, and dialogue are gripping. The author handles the fraught theme of ambiguous loss with grace and elegance.

This book is beautifully written and definitely has cinematic potential. At the beginning, I was getting Casablanca vibes and by the end, I was thinking about another favorite movie, The Year of Living Dangerously.

Highly recommended.

Samuel Sokobin, an American vice-consul in Nanking, China, during World War I, is dispatched upriver to investigate the disappearance of a noted American explorer, Frank Meyer, in Allison Alsup’s “Foreign Seed,” a “Heart of Darkness” sort of dark exploration which she tells us in an afterward is based largely on fact and which I found to be utterly compelling.
Speculation is that Meyer fell overboard from a steamer where he was last seen, though it seems unlikely that so rugged an adventurer would fall victim to such a mishap. But there’s no indication of foul play, and suicide seems equally unlikely, though there are indications that he wasn’t feeling well and may have been depressed.
A disagreeable business all-round to have to be looking into, Sokobin feels, particularly when, in the novel’s strongest scene, he has to identify remains believed to be those of Meyer which have been buried without a coffin and which are in the state you might imagine. Plus he is dealing with his own demons, including an affair that went bad which I’d liked to have seen more of and news that his brother, a flier with a Yank squadron, has been reported missing in a reconnaissance flight.
“This putrid, Godforsaken war,” Sokobin thinks of the war which hovers in the background of this novel reminiscent of the works of Greene, Conrad or Orwell. Also very much in the background is the vile antisemitism of the day, which put me in mind of a movie which coincidentally I had just seen, “Train to Zakopané,” in which an otherwise very appealing young woman asserts that she can smell a Jew a kilometer away, a sentiment voiced in Alsup’s novel when a character says that he would have known if Meyer were Jewish because “one can generally tell with Hebrews.”
All in all, one of the best books I’ve read in some time, Alsup’s novel, and one I can unqualifiedly recommend.