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Take a Trip... With Books Set in Other Countries
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The good earth
by Pearl S. Buck
In The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck paints an indelible portrait of China in the 1920s, when the last emperor reigned and the vast political and social upheavals of the twentieth century were but distant rumblings. This moving story of the honest farmer Wang Lung and his selfless wife O-Lan is must reading to fully appreciate the sweeping changes that have occurred in the lives of the Chinese people during the last century. Though more than eighty years have passed since this remarkable novel won the Pulitzer Prize, it has retained its popularity and become one of the great modern classics in American literature
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Daughter of Fortune
by Isabel Allende
Raised in the British colony of Valparaiso, Chile, after being abandoned as a baby, a pregnant Eliza follows her lover, Joaquin Andieta, to California at the height of the Gold Rush and finds adventure and adversity on her road to independence and love.
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The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Díaz
Living with an old-world mother and rebellious sister, an urban New Jersey misfit dreams of becoming the next J. R. R. Tolkien and believes that a long-standing family curse is thwarting his efforts to find love and happiness. A first novel by the author of the collection, Drown.
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The devotion of suspect X
by Keigo Higashino
In a first English-language translation of an award-winning work in Japan, a clever mathematics teacher orchestrates a cover-up after a confrontation between a violent man and his terror-stricken ex-wife results in the man’s accidental death.
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The dovekeepers : a novel
by Alice Hoffman
A tale inspired by the tragic first-century massacre of hundreds of Jewish people on the Masada mountain presents the stories of a hated daughter, a baker's wife, a girl disguised as a warrior and a medicine woman who keep doves and secrets while Roman soldiers draw near. By the author of the Oprah Book Club selection, Here on Earth.
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Cutting for stone
by A. Verghese
Twin brothers born from a secret love affair between an Indian nun and a British surgeon in Addis Ababa, Marion and Shiva Stone come of age in Ethiopia, where their love for the same woman drives them apart
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Claire of the sea light
by Edwidge Danticat
When a vibrant 7-year-old disappears from her Haitian community at the same time her father agonizingly decides to give her up so that she can have a better life, an ensuing search reveals the painful stories of neighbors whose lives the child touched.
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Leaving Berlin
by Joseph Kanon
Caught in the McCarthy anti-Communist investigations because of his prewar politics, a young Jewish writer who fled the Nazis to America makes a desperate bargain with the fledgling CIA to work as a spy in a decimated Berlin
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A tale for the time being
by Ruth L. Ozeki
A novelist on a remote island in the Pacific is linked to a bullied and depressed Tokyo teenager after discovering a Hello Kitty lunchbox that washed ashore in this new novel from the award-wining, best-selling author of My Year of Meats.
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China Dolls : a novel
by Lisa See
Overcoming respective pasts to audition for showgirl roles at an exclusive San Francisco nightclub, three Asian-American girls rely on each other for survival until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor causes one of them to be betrayed and sent to an internment camp.
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Burial rites
by Hannah Kent
Based on a true story, tells the tale of a young woman in Iceland in 1829 who was accused of murder and sent to an isolated farm to await execution and tells the farmer's family her side of the story.
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One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich
by Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn
First published in 1962, this novel describes a dark chapter in the history of Soviet Russia, depicting life in a work camp, and one man's fight to prevail over relentless dehumanization.
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The count of Monte Cristo
by Alexandre Dumas
Edmund Dantès, betrayed by his enemies and unjustly convicted of aiding the exiled Napoleon, escapes after fourteen years of imprisonment in the Château d'If and embarks on a carefully crafted plot to seek his revenge.
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A thousand splendid suns
by Khaled Hosseini
Two women born a generation apart witness the destruction of their home and family in war-torn Kabul, losses incurred over the course of thirty years that test the limits of their strength and courage. By the author of The Kite Runner.
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The snowman
by Jo Nesbø
Harry Hole investigates the disappearance of a woman whose scarf is found on a mysteriously built snowman, a case that is complicated by subsequent abductions and a menacing letter.
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The sympathizer
by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Follows a Viet Cong agent as he spies on a South Vietnamese army general and his compatriots as they start a new life on 1975 Los Angeles.
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Disgrace : A Novel
by J. M. Coetzee
In a novel set in post-apartheid South Africa, a fifty-two-year-old college professor who has lost his job for sleeping with a student tries to relate to his daughter, Lucy, who works with an ambitious African farmer.
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The book of tomorrow
by Cecelia Ahern
Forced into a humbler life with relatives in Ireland after the sudden death of her father, spoiled 16-year-old Tamara Goodwin discovers a diary of future entries written in her handwriting that she hopes will reveal the truth about her mother’s troubling health. By the best-selling author of P.S. I Love You.
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The bear and the nightingale : a novel
by Katherine Arden
A debut novel inspired by Russian fairy tales follows the experiences of a wild young girl who taps the mysterious powers of a precious necklace given to her father years earlier to save her village from dark and dangerous forces.
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The lost city of Z : a tale of deadly obsession in the Amazon
by David Grann
Interweaves the story of British explorer Percy Fawcett, who vanished during a 1925 expedition into the Amazon, with the author's own quest to uncover the mysteries surrounding Fawcett's final journey and the secrets of what lies deep in the Amazon jungle, in the book that inspired the forthcoming film.
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Behind the beautiful forevers
by Katherine Boo
A first book by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist profiles everyday life in the settlement of Annawadi as experienced by a Muslim teen, an ambitious rural mother of a prospective female college student and a young scrap metal thief, in an account that illuminates how their efforts to build better lives are challenged by regional religious, caste and economic tensions.
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Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
by Azar Nafisi
Describes growing up in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the group of young women who came together at her home in secret every Thursday to read and discuss great books of Western literature, explaining the influence of Lolita, The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, and other works on their lives and goals.
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White teeth : a novel
by Zadie Smith
Set in post-war London, this novel of the racial, political, and social upheaval of the last half-century follows two families--the Joneses and the Iqbals, both outsiders from within the former British empire--as they make their way in modern England.
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Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi
Two half-sisters, unknown to each other, are born into different villages in 18th-century Ghana and experience profoundly different lives and legacies throughout subsequent generations marked by wealth, slavery, war, coal mining, the Great Migration and the realities of 20th-century Harlem.
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The Return of the Native
by Thomas Hardy
A young beauty who feels trapped living in the country with her grandfather plots her escape with a dashing suitor. But her plans are shaken when a handsome local man returns from Paris, hoping to make her his bride. Torn by her passion for two men, and a dream she will never abandon, Eustacia Vye learns that fate holds all the answers.
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The invisible bridge
by Julie Orringer
Paris, 1937. A Hungarian-Jewish architecture student arrives from Budapest with a mysterious letter he promised to deliver. But when he falls into a complicated relationship with the recipient, he becomes privy to a secret that will alter the course of his family's history. From a small Hungarian town to the grand opera houses of Budapest and Paris to an unimaginable life in labor camps, this is the story of a family shattered and remade in history's darkest hour.
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First they killed my father : a daughter of Cambodia remembers
by Loung Ung
The stirring true story of a girl who survived the brutality of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia retraces her steps from the forced "evacuation" of Phnom Penh in 1975 when she was a girl of five, to her family's subsequent movements from town to town and eventual separation, which resulted in her parents' deaths and her being trained as a child soldier.
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The sound of things falling
by Juan Gabriel Vásquez
A U.S. release of an award-winning novel by the author of The Informers finds Bogotá resident Antonio Yammara reflecting on a mid-20th-century uprising between Pablo Escobar's drug cartel and government forces that trapped Pablo's community in a nightmarish existence and culminated in a friend's murder.
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Seven years in Tibet
by Heinrich Harrer
Recounts how the author, an Austrian, escaped from an English internment camp in India in 1943 and spent the next seven years in Tibet, observing its social practices, religion, politics, and people
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