Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie
About: In this enchanting tale about the magic of reading and the wonder of romantic awakening, two hapless city boys are exiled to a remote mountain village for reeducation during China's infamous Cultural Revolution. There thy meet the daughter of the local tailor and discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation. As they flirt with the seamstress and secretly devour these banned works, they find transit from their grim surroundings to worlds they never imagined.
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Village of Stone by Xiaolu
About: Village of Stone brilliantly evokes the harshness of life on the typhoon-battered coast of China, where fishermen are often lost to violent seas and children regularly swept away. It is the beautiful, haunting story of one little girl's struggle to endure silence, solitude and the shame of sexual abuse, but it is also an incisive portrait of China's new urban youth, who have hidden behind their modern lifestyle all the poverty and cruelty of their past. |
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File Size: | 9 kb |
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Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
About: Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s. Things Fall Apart explores one man' futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political and religious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. With more than twenty million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a precolonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities. |
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File Size: | 8 kb |
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Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
About: In the city of Enugu, Nigeria, fifteen-year-old Kambili and her older brother, Jaja, lead a privileged life. Their Papa is a wealthy and respected businessman; they live in a beautiful house; and they attend an exclusive missionary school. But, as Kambili reveals in her tender-hearted account, their home life is anything but harmonious. Her father, a fanatically religious man, has impossible expectations of his children and wife. When Kambili's loving and outspoken Aunty Ifeoma persuades her brother that the children should visit her in Nsukka, Kambili and Jaja take their fist trip away from home. Once inside their Aunty Ifeoma's flat, they discover a whole new world. When Kambili and Jaja return home changed by their newfound freedom, tension within the family escalates. And Kambili must find the strength to keep her loved ones together after her mother commits a desprate act. |
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File Size: | 10 kb |
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The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera
About: Eight-year-old Kahu craves her great-grandfather's love and attention. But he's focused on his duties as chief of Ngati Konohi in Whangara, on the East Coast - a tribe that claims descent from the legendary 'whale rider.' In every generation since the whale rider, a male has inherited the title of chief. But now there is no male heir - there's only Hahu. She should be next in line for the title, but her great-grandfather is blinded by tradition and sees no use for a girl. Kahu will not be ignored. And in her struggle she has a unique ally: the whale rider himself, from whom she has inherited the ability to communicate with whales. |
Potiki by Patricia Grace About: This compelling novel will resonate for people everywhere who find their livelihood threatened by "Dollarmen" - property speculators advocating golf courses, high rises, shopping malls, and tourist attractions. In Potiki, one community's response to attacks on their ancestral values and symbols provides moving affirmation of the relationship between land an dhte people who live on it. |
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File Size: | 11 kb |
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One Amazing Thing by Chitra Divakaruni
About: Late afternoon sun sneaks through the windows of a passport and visa office in an unnamed American city. Most customers and even most office workers have come and gone, but nine people remain. A punky teenager with an unexpected gift. An upper-class Caucasian couple whose relationship is disintegrating. A young Muslim-American man struggling with the fallout of 9/11. A graduate student haunted by a question about love. An African-American ex-soldier searching for redemption. A Chinese grandmother with a secret past. And two visa office workers on the verge of an adulterous affair. When an earthquake rips through the afternoon lull, trapping these nine characters together, their focus first jolts to their collective struggle to survive. There's little food. The office begins to flood. Then, at a moment when the psychological and emotional stress seems nearly too much for them to bear, the young graduate student suggests that each tell a personal tale, "one amazing thing" from their lives, which they have never told anyone before. And as their surprising stories of romance, marriage, family, political upheaval, and self-discovery unfold against the urgency of their life-or-death circumstances, the novel proves the transcendent power of stories and the meaningfulness of human expression itself. From Chitra Divakaruni, author of such finely wrought, bestselling novels as Sister of My Heart, The Palace of Illusions, and The Mistress of Spices, comes her most compelling and transporting story to date. One Amazing Thing is a passionate creation about survival -- and about the reasons to survive. |