If You liked A Thousand Splendid Suns
If You liked In one of the best books of reportage of Afghan life after the fall of the Taliban, Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad tells how he spent three months living with the Kabul bookseller Sultan Khan in the spring of 2002, observing the public and private worlds of Kabul's people as a country rebuilds itself in The Bookseller of Kabul. This is a non-fiction treat that will remind some readers of Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran because of its daily descriptions of living in these countries and wonderful literary allusions.
This powerful novel swirls around Moshen and Zunaira when they find their lives as a diplomat and lawyer frozen by the ascendancy of the Taliban. Their situation becomes a nightmare when Zunaira is arrested and condemned to death. Khadra is the feminine pseudonym of a former Algerian army officer whose experience with Islamic radicals as well as with prolonged warfare bolster the novel’s sledgehammer power and authority. Booklist praised the book because of "Khadra's simple, elegant prose, finely drawn characters and chilling insights.”
This book captures the delicate balance of class and gender in contemporary India as witnessed through the lives of two women--Sera, an upper middle-class housewife, and Bhima, an illiterate domestic hardened by a life of loss and despair. Critics said that veteran journalist and Case Western Reserve professor Umrigar renders a collection of compelling and complex characters, from kind, conflicted Sera to fiercely devoted Bhima (who is based on the novelist's own childhood housekeeper). “Sadness suffuses this eloquent tale, whose heart-stopping plot twists reveal the ferocity of fate.”
This is a portrait of the immigrant experience that 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. Lahiri’s pen will entrance you into a story about characters that will resonate.
After years of lonely political exile, Turkish poet Ka returns to Istanbul to attend his mother's funeral and learns about a series of suicides among pious girls forbidden to wear headscarves. Pamuk mixes elements of fable and vividly embodies and painstakingly explores the collision of Western values with Islamic fundamentalism.
This novel is filled with romantic and culinary delights, the tradition of storytelling and a love story, as it tells the story of American-born Sirine's romance with Iraqi scholar Hanif in Los Angeles's Arab community. The novel extends its reach well beyond the personal story of two people who fall in love to look at Saddam Hussein's dictatorship when Hanif decides he must return to find the imprisoned brother and missing sister he left behind in Iraq.
A wealthy Islamic woman finds her arranged Middle Eastern marriage turning sour (and dangerous). She flees to the United States with her son, and makes a difficult new beginning there.
In this hauntingly beautiful tale, returning to her lush, dangerous homeland of Sri Lanka after years abroad, forensic scientist Anil Tissera investigates a mysterious skeleton that might hold the key to exposing a government conspiracy and bringing international attention to the horrors that years of terrorism and civil unrest have wrought in the country.
Lucius Beebe Memorial Library - - lme