The Judges

"You can't win unless you're judged." So somebody tells Mary Sorabi, and Mary is no stranger to being judged. She's a young woman, half-Indian, half-Chinese, who's a classical pianist, and plays the kind of music, music from the twentieth century, that most people hate. But that's her passion. When she wins a prestigious competition, her life changes, but rather than fill her with a sense of pride and accomplishment, it fills her with feelings of fear and claustrophobia because, suddenly, everything she does comes under scrutiny, and soon she realizes that her very existence is about to be judged. The Judges is a haunting, surreal story about prejudice, being different, pleasing others versus pleasing yourself, and being remembered versus being forgotten. In it we encounter a narrator who knows Mary but never discloses who he or she is, a man who may be a newspaper reporter and conducts a strangely twisted interview with her, excerpts of which surface throughout the novel, and, of course, the inscrutable and disturbing judges themselves.