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• Diana Abu-Jaber's
Cresent
Set in
Los Angeles, this is the personal story of American-born Sirine’s romance with Iraqi scholar Hanif. Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi dictatorship is revealed, as Hanif must return home to find his imprisoned brother.
• Bryce Courtenay's
Power of One
A young
English boy growing up in South Africa during World War II seeks
friendship and guidance from two men—one black and one white—as he is inspired to become a force
of one.
•
Andre Dubas's
House of Sand and Fog
Opportunity knocks for an Iranian
immigrant in California when the county offers for sale a seized
house at a bargain price. It will serve as a launching pad for his
real-estate business. When the county discovers it made an error, the drug-addicted woman who owned the house demands
its return, but the Iranian refuses.Unfortunately for him, the woman's lover is a policeman who
takes the law into his hands.
•
Thu Huong Duong's
Beyond Illusions
The tale of a young woman who marries her
professor because she so admires his idealism. When he sells out
everything he believes in order to support her, her love goes.
Only when they are both beyond illusions can they try again for a real relationship.
•
Philip Hensher's
The Mulberry Empire: Or the Two Virtuous Journeys of the
Amir Dost
Mohammed Khan
In the spring of 1839, fifty thousand
British forces entered Afghanistan possessed of the certainty
that they would replace the Amir with someone less hostile
toward their ally, the King of the Punjab. Three years later, a
single British horseman rode out of the Afghan mountains into
India-the sole survivor of the original vast contingent. "The
Mulberry Empire" is the story of the politics and people on both
sides of this conflict.
• Yasmina Khadra's
The Swallows of Kabul
Set in Kabul under the rule of the
Taliban, this novel takes readers into the lives of two couples
on opposite sides of the religious conflict. All of their lives have been altered
by the Taliban, and a dramatic incident involving the stoning of an adulterous woman brings them together in a
story of absurd cruelty and transcendent love and sacrifice.
• Jhumpa Lahiri's
The Namesake
A portrait of the immigrant experience
follows the Ganguli family from their traditional life in India through their arrival in Massachusetts
in the late 1960s and their difficult melding into an American way of life.
• Aimee Liu's
Flash House
Follow the lives of a missing
journalist’s wife, an 11-year-old prostitute and a mysterious
Australian across post-World War II India, Kashmir and China.
• Michael Ondaatje's
Anil's Ghost
Forensic anthropologist Anil Tissera’s
search for a skeleton’s identity leads her on a surreal journey
in a land paralyzed by fear when she returns to her home in Sri Lanka to
prove that mass murders are taking place.
• Asne Seierstad's
The
Bookseller of Kabul
This is the daily life of a middle-class
family in Kabul, the family of Sultan Khan, a bookseller in
Kabul. Sultan has lived through several repressive regimes, all
of which burned and censored his books. Now with the Taliban
gone, he is free to pursue his business and his dreams of
turning his large collection into a library for Afghanistan.
Last updated October 19, 2005. For suggestions or
comments, please contact Courtney Moore (cmoore@wppl.org).
Most synopses courtesy of the
Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. |
