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ASIA The continent with all the superlatives: the biggest (1/3 of the world's land mass), the oldest civilizations, the most people (60 % of the world's population) speaking the most languages (2300+). Asia also has the highest mountains and tallest buildings.
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by Rabih Alameddine
Aaliya is an aging woman who for decades has begun the year translating one of her favorite books into Arabic. She's suffered through war, a bad marriage and the death of a close friend, but most exasperating for her are her pestering mother and half brothers, who've been lusting after her apartment.
Setting: Lebanon
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by Hala Alyan
On the eve of her daughter Alia's wedding, Salma reads the girl's future in a cup of coffee dregs. She sees an unsettled life for Alia and her children; she also sees travel, and luck. Setting: Palestine
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by Gina Apostol
Alternates between aerial shots, jump-cuts, and close-ups, moving backward and forward in time to get at a story of U.S.-Philippine relations by way of history, literature, language, and scholarship.
Setting: Phillipines
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by Tash Aw
Follows the journeys of two brothers and an American woman who are indelibly marked by the past -- and swept up in the tides of history. Setting: Indonesia
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by Quan Barry
At the peak of the war in Vietnam, a baby girl is born along the Song Ma River on the night of the full moon. This is Rabbit, who will journey away from her destroyed village with a makeshift family thrown together by war.
Setting: Vietnam
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by Nomi Eve
In 1920s Yemen a Jewish child could be "confiscated" by local Muslim leaders when her father died, even if her mother was still living. The only way for Jewish parents to prevent this was to betroth their daughter at a young age. Setting: Yemen
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by Roopa Farooki
A deceitful marriage in Calcutta sets in motion a rolling snowball of lies and double lives which will consume three generations of a single family.
Setting: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh
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by Zo Ferraris
When sixteen-year-old Nouf goes missing, along with a truck and her favorite camel, her prominent family calls on Nayir al-Sharqi, a desert guide, to lead a search party. Ten days later her body is discovered by anonymous desert travelers. But the coroner's office determines that Nouf died not of dehydration but from drowning.
Setting: Saudi Arabia
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by Ru Freeman
Latha's story begins when she is a young girl and servant to a family with a daughter her age. They are friends, yet they are also master and servant. Latha believes she is meant for more than servitude, that she deserves more than what she has; but time and again her struggle to escape her class only makes it more obvious that she cannot break free. Setting: Sri Lanka
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by Malu Halasa
The Sabas family lives in a small town that for centuries has been descended upon by all manner of invader, the latest a scourge of disconcerting Evangelical tourists.
Setting: Jordan
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by Mohammed Hanif
A darkly witty imagining of the circumstances surrounding the mysterious plane crash that killed Pakistan's military ruler, General Zia, in August 1988.
Setting: Pakistan
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by Takashi Hiraide
A subtly moving and exceptionally beautiful novel about the transient nature of life and idiosyncratic but deeply felt ways of living.
Setting: Japan
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by Saad Z. Hossain
When Indelbed's alcoholic father falls into a supernatural stupor, Indelbed discovers that his late mother was a djinn; his father, a magician. Since Indelbed's hybrid bloodline threatens djinn culture, a powerful being banishes him to a pit.
Setting: Bangladesh
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by Khaled Khalfah
Abdel Latif dies peacefully in a hospital bed in Damascus. His final wish is to be buried in the family plot in their ancestral village of Anabiya, which is only a two-hour drive from Damascus. There's only one problem: the country is a war zone. Setting: Syria
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by Un-su Kim
Reseng, 32, has been a professional assassin for 15 years, minus a short factory-worker stint at 22, while playing house with the love of his life. That he's survived this long never mind his risky career, he's also a two-pack-a-day smoker with a beer-for-breakfast diet is remarkable. Setting: Korea
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by Kevin Kwan
When New Yorker Rachel Chu agrees to spend the summer in Singapore with her boyfriend, Nicholas Young, she envisions a humble family home and quality time with the man she hopes to marry. But Nick has failed to give his girlfriend a few key details.
Setting: Singapore
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by Shahriyār Mandanī'pūr
A novel steeped in Persian folklore and contemporary Middle Eastern history tells the story of playboy Amir whose whole life changes when his left arm is severed during the Iran-Iraq War and he begins to be haunted by the vision of a mysterious woman.
Setting: Iran
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by Rani Manicka
Lakshmi is a bright-eyed, carefree child in Ceylon. But at 14, her mother marries her to Ayah, a 37-year-old rich widower living in Malaysia. When she arrives at her new home, she promptly discovers that Ayah is not rich at all, but a clerk who had borrowed a gold watch and a servant to trick Lakshmi's mother.
Setting: Malaysia
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by Neel Mukherjee
Five diverse lives in India are traced and linked, exposing the aching gulfs in experience and opportunity that exist in a complex nation. Particle physicists, Maoist terrorists, punitive employers, servants, and managers all have roles, as well as themes of money, work, politics, survival, and women. Setting: India
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by Timeri Murari
When the Taliban's Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice announces that they are sponsoring a cricket tournament, with the winning team receiving training in Pakistan, the brother and cousins of Rukhsana, a female journalist living in Kabul, Afghanistan, see it as their means of escape from the oppressive regime. Setting: Afghanistan
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by Dåưanwt Phimwan
When five-year-old Kampol is told by his father to wait for him in front of some run-down apartment buildings, the confused boy does as told -- he waits, and waits, and waits, until he realizes his father isn't coming back anytime soon.
Setting: Thailand
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by Virginia Pye
On the windswept plains of northwestern China, Mongol bandits swoop down upon an American missionary couple and steal their small child. The Reverend sets out in search of the boy and becomes lost in the rugged, corrupt countryside populated by opium dens, sly nomadic warlords and traveling circuses.
Setting: Mongolia
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by Tanis Rideout
George Mallory is famous for answering "Because it's there" when asked why he kept trying to scale Everest, but Rideout's novel about Mallory's disastrous last climbing attempt is the story of a love triangle: a man, a woman and a mountain.
Setting: Nepal
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by Amad Sa'dw
Hadi, an eccentric scavenger in U.S.-occupied Baghdad, collects human body parts and cobbles them together into a single corpse, but discovers his creation is missing just as a series of strange murders begins to plague the city.
Setting: Iraq
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by Amanda Sthers
Leaving a thriving medical practice in Paris to raise pigs in Israel, a Jewish cardiologist disconnects himself from modern technology, forcing his gay playwright son, heartbroken daughter and cancer-stricken wife to correspond strictly through written letters.
Setting: Israel
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by Camron Steve Wright
Sang Ly and her husband earn their living by sifting through the trash at a large city dump. Desperately poor, they live with their sickly baby boy in a one-room hut on a small piece of land that they rent from the cantankerous Rent Collector. Everything changes when one day Sang Ly discovers the Rent Collector's secret.
Setting: Cambodia
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by Ming-Yi Wu
When a tsunami sends a massive island made entirely of trash crashing into the Taiwanese coast, two very different people -- an outcast from a mythical island and a woman on the verge of suicide -- are united in ways they never could have imagined.
Setting: Taiwan
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by Lijia Zhang
To everyone in her village, Lotus is a success: she wears glamorous clothes, has a lucrative job at a restaurant in Shenzhen, and sends all her earnings home to ensure her brother can attend university. What Lotus can't bear to reveal is that she's actually a ji, a working girl at the Moonflower Massage Parlor.
Setting: China
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Main Branch Richmond Public Library 101 E. Franklin St. Richmond, VA 23219 (804)646-7223
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