The First Noble Truth
By C Lynn Murphy
Genre: Literary Fiction
Available on Amazon!
Machiko Yamamoto pulls out her hair, picks at her skin, and
triple checks the locks to the house behind the school where she works. When a
foreigner moves into a neighboring thatched roof cottage, she quickly falls in
love with the quiet woman with the mangled hand.
Krista Black does not mind the weekly visits from the local
English teacher. The scarred woman seems harmless, but she always wants to talk
about travel and language and why Krista has come to the remote, Japanese
village. Krista avoids her questions. She has seen much of the world, and she
knows what it does to fragile people. Machiko may want to know her, but she
could never understand her.
Set in Kyoto, New England, Africa and Kathmandu, THE FIRST
NOBLE TRUTH is a story of redemption, interwoven between two protagonists,
across two cultures. It peers beneath the comfort of expected storytelling to
investigate the dualities of suffering and joy, religion and sex, and cruelty
and kindness.
My Review
I
am surprised how the author could write a book containing death, sadness, and
suffering while leaving me with a peaceful feeling at the end. The two main
characters are Machiko Yamamoto and Krista Black. Two different women from two
very different ways of life. They spark a friendship around traveling,
language, and culture.
I enjoyed the in-depth
background given about each protagonist and especially appreciated how mental
illness was treated vastly different in the two lifestyles. The First Noble
Truth is a beautiful story about friendship, the dark and light within life,
and the will to keep moving forward.
Author Info
Lynn Murphy was born in New Hampshire, but has since lived
in Scotland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, England, Nepal, India, and
Mongolia. She also spent a year backpacking across the African continent for
kicks.
She is a doctoral candidate in Buddhist Studies at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, as well as a graduate of St Andrews
University (M.A.) and Oxford University (MPhil).
Whilst a resident at a Tibetan Buddhist nunnery in the
Himalayas, she wrote her first book, 'The First Noble Truth.'
She currently lives between Mongolia and the UK, where she
is conducting fieldwork on post-Soviet economies of the funeral industry and
their impact on contemporary Mongolian cultural and religious identity.
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