From one of Canada’s best young voices comes a sweeping literary adventure set against the backdrop of French Indo-China.

Paris, 1909: Adélie Tremier, a young widow suffering the final stages of tuberculosis, flees for French-occupied Indo-China, through the lush forests of Laos, to seek out a fabled spring of immortality that might allow her to return to her nine-year-old son.

Laos, 1936: Pierre Lazarie, a young academic turned Saigon bureaucrat, is sent by Adélie’s son, now an Army captain, to find his long-lost mother. Though his assigned quest fulfills Pierre’s fantasy to travel up the exotic Mekong, he is saddled with his colleague Henri LeDallic, an Indo-China old-timer who would rather glory in his loutish past than hunt for ghosts in the jungle. Yet what this mismatched pair discovers forms the mysterious heart of Adam Lewis Schroeder’s brilliant and compelling new novel.

In the Fabled East is a rich and sensual depiction of Southeast Asia, charting the loss of innocence of both individuals and the world at large. Echoing Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad, this is historical fiction written with wisdom and panache.

• D&M, Canada, March 2010

Praise for In the Fabled East

“Adam Lewis Schroeder's second novel is lush, complicated, sensual and mysterious.”
-St John Telegraph-Journal

“How welcome is an enjoyable novel that seems so unapologetically on the wrong side of today’s literary and cultural politics!”
-The Globe and Mail

"Simply put, In the Fabled East is a winner, drawing on disparate elements to create a singular, stunning whole. It is beautiful, and haunting; brutal, and realistic; it is strange and alien but fundamentally familiar and human; it is thoughtful, and suspenseful, meditative and action-filled. It is the sort of book that not only becomes a bestseller but is passed from hand to hand, shared among readers."
-Vancouver Sun

"In a tremendously satisfying dénouement, our principal players are united partly by war, partly by the dissolution of empire, but mainly by a mother-and-child reunion — the dimensions of which can only be imagined within the pages of this marvelous and compelling tale."
-Toronto Star