NovelWorld

Over the course of a passionate love affair in Hong Kong spanning four days and three nights, Gao is confronted and challenged by Margarethe, a German Jew who can’t forget her past. Slowly she convinces him to relive the hateful memories of the country that betrayed him and hunted him. The year is 1997. Hong Kong is about to be swallowed back up by the China that Gao can’t escape.

In a stream-of-consciousness return to the degradations and narrow escapes of the nightmare years, Gao creates his “one man’s bible” of terrible memories. He relives the hysteria of the purges, the beatings and suicides, the secret trysts and uncountable losses in the country he fled, returning to his personal hell to bear witness and transform the pain into literature and testimony.

THE OXFORD MURDERS by Guillermo Martinez

For three hundred years, people have died trying to solve the most ancient problem in mathematics. Now a stolen paper has provided the springboard for a possible proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, and someone has begun to commit imperceptible murders.

Join a 22-year-old graduate student from Argentina as his stay at Oxford turns into a treacherous puzzle, where the mysterious mathematical genius, Arthur Seldom, pits his wits against Inspector Petersen of the Oxford police.

Martinez has crafted a thrilling, intellectually-teasing tour-de-force that’s part Arthur Conan Doyle, part Jorge Luis Borges, dizzyingly original and refreshingly smart, with a whipcrack of an ending.

PARADISE TRAVEL by Jorge Franco

Marlon Cruz is so crazy about Reina that he’d follow her anywhere, even New York. When you’re an illegal immigrant from Colombia and you know only one word of English, don’t go for a walk in New York City at night.

Stuck in a seedy hotel, out of money, out of hope, he and Reina have a spat and Marlon goes outside for a walk and a smoke. When he turns around, there’s a policeman behind him. Marlon runs. He’ll never find his way back.

How a desperate, penniless young immigrant slowly puts himself back together again in a little Colombian restaurant makes a delightfully comic novel about the heartbreaking business of illegal immigration. Gabriel Garcia Marquez says that Jorge Franco will inherit his place in Latin American literature. Discover him now.

PERSEPOLIS by Marjane Satrapi

Experience an ordinary girlhood in Iran – the veils, the riots, the assassinations – in this comic book memoir masterpiece. Marjane Satrapi’s stark, ironic images and unsentimental honesty make this unusual coming-of-age tale a visual joy and an outspoken humanitarian cry.

This funny, heartbreaking little autobiography has a graphic style that becomes a world all its own, the most personal kind of art.

You’ll laugh and cry through these candid adventures of a smart, spunky girl surviving war and a repressive religious regime. It’s a loving tribute to her parents, who ultimately got her safely out of Iran, as well as to those uncles and cousins who didn’t escape.

PERSEPOLIS 2 by Marjane Satrapi

Author/artist Marjane Satrapi has done it again, in a sequel every bit as wonderful as her cartoon-strip memoir, Persepolis. This time her feisty, vulnerable teenage heroine tackles the painful confusion of being a third-worlder in the West.

From student to waitress to aerobics instructor, from a boarding house run by nuns to a rooming house shared with eight gay men, Marji is growing up fast. She’s the school’s official haircutter. She’s the school’s official drug dealer. And while Marji is learning about the sexual revolution, her parents are enduring the bombing of Iran.

Satrapi tells it all with startling honesty, brilliantly visualized in her trademark black-and-white graphic style. Refreshingly candid, Marji’s hilarious self-examination is an uninhibited confession of growing up in the 80’s.

THE PLACES IN BETWEEN by Rory Stewart

Rory Stewart is the smart person’s hero, a brave and well-informed 30-year-old Scotsman banking on the hospitality of the Muslim world, as he sets out to walk across Afghanistan. This is travel writing at its best. As he follows in the footsteps of Babur, the first Emperor of Mughal India, he stops in over 500 village homes, talking with people of all ages, from soldiers to shepherds. Best of all, in a land where dogs are considered unclean, he adopts a mistreated old war dog, names him Babur, and determines to take Babur with him all the way back to Scotland. Take a plunge into reality, and see Afghanistan in all its complexity in the company of a superb writer and a fine human being.

PLATFORM by Michel Houellebecq

Some people will hate this book. Some will find it brave and exhilarating. Not since France gave the world the elegant eroticism of The Story of O and Emmanuelle has there been a novel so challenging on the subject of human sexuality.

Can sex be subject to global market forces? Mild-mannered, reclusive, forty-year-old Michel accidentally becomes involved in a scheme to capitalize on sex tourism, creating a worldwide chain of “friendly” hotels.

With philosophical echoes of Camus and Voltaire, in a subtly comic, satirical plot moving from Thailand to Cuba, author Michel Houellebecq has much to criticize about our society’s attitude toward sex in this shocking, prophetic, thought-crammed masterpiece, an honest story about love and business. Unforgettable.

THE RABBI’S CAT by Joann Sfar

Welcome to 1930’s Algeria. When the Rabbi Abraham’s cat silences an annoying parrot by eating it, he’s given the power of speech and a chance to challenge his law-abiding master’s religious thinking by demanding to be made into a Jewish cat and given a bar mitzvah.

Joann Sfar’s brilliant comic art, reproduced in gorgeous color, crackles with subtle humor and a sad wisdom as the cat chronicles a host of human foibles, while the characters around him grow and change in unexpected ways.

Watch the cat pit his down-to-earth street realism against Rabbi Abraham’s zeal for rabbinical law in a winding tale of stories within stories, from hilarious to deeply touching, from scholarly to slapstick. An educated delight for adults.

THE ROMANIAN by Bruce Benderson

While trying to tastefully translate the insipid autobiography of Celine Dion and take care of his critical, commanding ninety-year-old mother, author Bruce Benderson has his hands more than full with Romulus, the sexy, enigmatic twenty-four-year-old Romanian hustler leading him on a seamy tour of Hungary and Romania. This is when Bruce is not being chased by wild dogs. A hilarious, heartbreaking plunge into a sexual obsession and, at the same time, Romania’s tortured history and Eastern Europe today. A literary whirlwind, beautifully written with insight, intelligence and buckets of wit.

ROUSE UP O YOUNG MEN OF THE NEW AGE!by Kenzaburo Oe

Nobel-winner Oe’s new novel is a tribute to a father’s titanic, unconditional love for his epileptic son. Rouse Up completely blurs the genre boundaries between fiction, memoir and literary criticism, using the mystical, mythic poetry of William Blake (from which comes the novel’s title) to search for ways to communicate with his disabled 19-year-old son, nicknamed Eeyore, a boy born with two brains, one inside and one outside his skull.

It’s a stream-of-consciousness monologue littered with unforgettable scenes, a slow and thoughtful meditation by a brilliant, brave and compassionate man whose love for his own son defied and changed Japan’s silent shame attitude toward abnormal children.

SATURDAY by Ian McEwan

Henry Perowne is a London neurosurgeon with a wife he adores and two brilliant kids. He’s got a huge house and a showpiece Mercedes and still plays a mean game of squash. He’s got it all. Some people do.

Some people, however, like Baxter, never get a break, are genetically doomed to malfunction and break down without ever tasting the sweet treats of life.

On a dark Saturday in the middle of February, 2003, as America prepares to invade Iraq and London is immobilized by an historic outcry for peace, the haves and the have-nots can collide and violently change each other’s lives. The author of Atonement has written a superb investigation of modern life in an age of privilege and urban violence. A stunning literary performance.

SCRIBBLING THE CAT by Alexandra Fuller

To understand the nature of the war that drove her family from their Rhodesian farm, the author of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight ignores her father’s advice and takes a scary journey back to the mountain in Mozambique where men like K, her parents’ neighbor, and his crazy war buddies tortured and slaughtered and buried their terrible secrets thirty years ago.

Accompanied by a ruthless killing machine of a soldier-for-hire who has stopped fighting and found God, Fuller takes the reader through the poorest country in the world on a heart-stopping quest into a veritable heart of darkness, to a secluded African island dominated by Mapenga, the irresistible charmer, and his dangerous pet lion, Mambo. Unforgettable.

THE SEA by John Banville

Long ago, when Max Morden was eleven, the Grace family would come every summer to rent the grand mansion known as the Cedars in the little Irish village of Ballyless. Max fell in love. Then Max fell in love again.

Now, fifty years later, Max has come back to rent a room in the Cedars, now reduced to a rooming-house, where he will brood over his role in the tragic mysteries of the past.

Here is the novel that shocked Britain by snatching this year’s Booker Prize from the expected literary giants. Settle back and enjoy a true masterpiece, with every sentence a weighed and composed joy, a banquet of gorgeous prose spinning an unpredictable tale of a poor boy spellbound by a wealthy family out of control.

THE SHADOW OF THE WIND by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Ten-year-old Daniel wakes up crying because he’s forgotten his dead mother’s face. That day his father takes him to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and gives him the last existing copy of a masterpiece. Someone is systematically destroying every copy of The Shadow of the Wind. That someone will do anything to get Daniel’s book.

So it begins, and there’s no turning back in this hypnotic 500-page epic as Daniel embarks on a labyrinth of a plot through the foggy backstreets of 1950’s Barcelona. It’s like Great Expectations and Les Miserables and The Phantom of the Opera all rolled into one rollercoaster of surprises, secrets and lies, with cold-hearted beautiful girls, a deadly stalking police inspector, and the funniest sidekick since Sancho Panza in a passionate tribute to the world of writers, booksellers, and books.

SHORT HISTORY OF TRACTORS IN UKRAINIAN M. Lewycka

Here’s a smart comedy actually shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Nadia and her sister Vera hate each other. But 83-year-old Pappa has just decided to remarry a gorgeous 36-year-old Russian divorcee. It’s time for the two embittered sisters to join forces against a common enemy, a buxom Russian babe in search of a husband and a bankroll.

Set in modern Britain, author Lewycka’s social comedy has a harrowing back-story in 1932, when Stalin ruthlessly punished Ukrainian farmers who resisted his tractor industrialization by confiscating their entire harvest, starving thousands.

It’s an all-out, no-holds-barred family feud, as this lovable cast of characters battle each other tooth-and-nail in a story that’s a love-song to engineering and a touching meditation on what it means to be an immigrant.

SIGHTSEEING by Rattawut Lapcharoensap

Amid the farangs who tour Thailand interested only in sex and elephants are the real people of these smart, spare, and deeply moving stories by a 25-year-old Thai-American.

A college-bound boy on his last vacation with a mother who is going blind. A shy fourteen-year-old who convinces his brother to take him to a sex club. A pet pig named Clint Eastwood who is endangered by teen jealousy. Two Thai boys fascinated by a girl refugee in an illegal Cambodian shantytown.

And then there’s the family tested to the breaking point in the concluding novella, “Cockfighter” – a perfectly-structured little masterpiece told with relentless suspense right up to the last page.

SOLDIERS OF SALAMIS by Javier Cercas.

A Franco-supporter manages to escape from a mass execution at the end of the Spanish Civil War.

A pursuing soldier finds him, locks eyes with him, and lets him live.

Out of this incident springs a fascinating meditation on war, memory, and the writing of fiction. Part One shows the author’s discovery of the incident and his research, with a little help from his girlfriend. Part Two is the biography of the fascist who walked away from the firing squad alive. Part Three attempts to find the soldier who spared his life, in a search through all the nursing homes of France.

Tough and unsentimental, like no novel you’ve ever read before, this little volume has the cumulative effect of a bullet straight to the heart.

THE TENDER BAR by J. R. Moehringer

JR is prone to spend recess off by himself, worrying. His father is a runaway disk jockey, listened to more than seen. All the kid’s got is his brave, overworked mother, until one day when he’s nine years old JR runs into a bar to buy his uncle some cigarettes, and his life changes.

This heartwarming memoir by Pulitzer Prize-winning Moehringer chronicles the growing up of a little boy who discovers a bar full of fathers, in a book crowded with flawed, lovable characters and unforgettable episodes.

Through his traumatic years at Yale, the agonies of first love, his disasters in the newsroom of The New York Times, you’ll be swept up in this Arabian Nights of barroom tales told by a boy who grew up in a barroom.

THE TESTING OF LUTHER ALBRIGHT by MacKenzie Bezos

Luther Albright, husband and father, designer of the North Fork dam, is being investigated. He’s lived in Sacramento his whole life. He does all his own plumbing. He tries to be a good man. He hides his doubts and fears from his wife and son. That’s how he lost them. He’s going to tell you how it happened.

Twenty years ago, in 1983, Luther’s fifteen-year-old son, Elliott, decided to get a reaction out of his father, to break through his reserve. He tried nine times.

Bezos’ first novel is a masterfully-understated examination of a man who has buried his emotions so deeply he can no longer find them, who misreads his co-workers and fails to connect with his family, until his son’s decision to write a report on his grandfather rattles Luther Albright to the foundations.

THE TRUE SOURCES OF THE NILE by Sarah Stone

Compelling, exotic, fiercely sensual, this novel is filled with thoughtful joys.

It’s the story of Anne Copeland, morally-conscious California grad student, now a human rights activist in colorful, exotic Burundi. But her torrid love affair there, her terrifying escape from the bloodbath riots, are only part of the story.

While Anne is head-over-heels in love with a sexually-enchanting, modern-day African prince, Anne’s dying mother can only bear to read romance novels, and Anne’s bitter sister, Margaret, is quietly embezzling her mother’s funds.

Stone’s well-written love scenes lead into a questioning of the real nature of erotic romance. What is the best way to make this a better world? How is love really shown amid the deceptions and lies of an ordinary family?

TRUE STORY by Michael Finkel

Not since Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood has the reporting of a murder been so personalized and literately re-created. The reader is sucked into participating right along with the author, lured into believing the charming liar, Christian Longo, accused of murdering his wife and three children. But the reporter himself is a liar, caught in a public New York Times disgrace and has no right for anyone to believe him. The friendship between these two men comes to a crisis at the trial with a couple of unforgettable shockers. Here’s an Umberto Eco spin on true crime in a compulsively-readable confession.

THE TWELVE LITTLE CAKES by Dominika Dery

Here’s the true story of talkative, irrepressible Dominika, too full of questions, too short for ballet, living in Communist Czechoslovakia in the 1970’s. Her parents are shunned, expelled from the Communist Party. Her house is under reconstruction, battling rainstorms and mudslides. While her mother writes books that her bosses take credit for and her father drives taxis illegally at night, Dominika scandalizes the church, pesters the neighbors, upsets her teachers, and longs to dance in Swan Lake.

From its charming beginning, where her mother dreams of Dominika a year before she’s born, to Dominika’s first theatrical appearance on stage as a naughty egg, the book radiates a contagious faith in human nature as the bravely independent, hopelessly optimistic Furman family struggle to survive together.

THE UNCOMFORTABLE DEAD by Paco Ignacio Taibo II and Subcomandante Marcos

The masked leader of the Zapatista revolution joins Mexico’s premier detective writer to create a hilarious literary feast.

Here’s a narrative duet of alternating chapters, passionately political and wildly funny, as two smart writers have their two detectives join forces to solve a mystery that begins with phone calls from a dead man – and might involve a taco vendor from Juarez City who impersonates bin Laden on news broadcasts.

Meet humble, bright, easily confused Elias Contreras, the country bumpkin detective hero, trying to figure out the confusing ways of modern Mexico City.

Enjoy a wacky political mystery noir, Mexican-style. It’s achingly sincere, occasionally profound, and brimming with literary antics, a revolutionary novel co-authored by a man whose real-life revolution has made Zapatista a modern household word.

WAR TRASH by Ha Jin

Let Ha Jin be your Dante. His brutal, brilliant new novel descends into the hell of an American POW camp during the Korean War, and the Chinese POWs who had to choose between returning to Red China or escaping to Free China. Abandoned in battle, 23-year-old Yu Yuan and the other survivors are herded into tents and a world of imprisonment, where Chinese is pitted against Chinese in horrific power struggles, described in Ha Jin’s cool, objective, humanitarian style.

To find his way back to his aged mother and waiting fiancée, Yu Yuan will have to weave his way through ruthless camp political violence, survive prison riots and suicidal demonstrations, endure tattooing by force and witness friends on both side, Nationalist and Communist, sacrifice their lives for illusionary ideals.

WE ARE ALL THE SAME by Jim Wooten

Xolani Nkosi was born with AIDS in a Zululand squatters’ camp so small and wretched no one ever bothered to give it a name. A shelter called Guest House in South Africa takes him in at the age of three. When the boy’s 25-year-old mother dies of AIDS, and the AIDS shelter folds for lack of funds, the boy is adopted by the director, Gail Johnson. Together Gail and her adopted son will change African history.

This extraordinary biography builds to a climax at a world AIDS conference where eleven-year-old Nkosi, already dying, is pitted against the President of South Africa, Thabo Mkebi, who denies that the HIV virus exists. Informative, heartbreaking, superbly done reporting by a veteran ABC correspondent whose emotional detachment is broken forever.

WHAT IS THE WHAT by Dave Eggers

Thousands of homeless boys have no choice: walk all the way across Sudan or be killed. This magnificent novel is one boy’s story.

Their fathers and older brothers have been shot. Their mothers and sisters have been raped and kidnapped. Their villages have been burned. They’re an army of barely teenage boys. The unlucky ones will be picked off by lions, machine gunned, blown up by government bombs, cut down by machetes, mines, disease, hunger, and exhaustion.

But some will survive. Some will go to college in America.

Dave Eggers conducted over 100 hours of interviews with Valentino Achak Deng. Here’s the result, a dazzling literary vanishing act, as Eggers takes on Achak’s voice and lets him tell the story in his own words, in a gripping narrative that doesn’t let up from the first page. Prepare to be shaken and deeply moved.

WHAT WAS SHE THINKING? by Zoe Heller

Lonely, unpopular old Barbara Covett knows all about the pretty teacher who fell in love with her student – or does she?

Provocative, morally complex, Zoe Heller’s novel is a compulsively-readable peek behind tabloid headlines into the heart of a sensational, forbidden love affair.

A pretty, well-meaning art teacher has stumbled into an illegal affair with a fifteen-year-old boy. She’s been caught. She’s become the most hated woman in the media. Now her only friend, a crabby, opinionated history teacher, is about to set the record straight. It’s a narrative land-mined with unexpected depths beneath the grumpy sarcasm. Prepare to be deeply moved as author Heller coolly, comically explores the ambiguous power of friendship – to destroy and to heal.

WHITEMAN by Tony D’Souza

The truck carries you miles out into Ivory Coast. It drops you off within sight of a village And drives away.

Jack Diaz wants to do his part. He joins Potable Water International and trains to help people drink clean water. But 9/11 has obliterated any hope of funding. He’s stranded. He decides to stay. He decides to become a part of the village, and make a difference.

Author Tony D’Souza has written a passionate love song to Africa, hilarious and heartbreaking, teeming with unforgettable characters. Watch Jack Diaz grow up, from a novice making every mistake to a seasoned volunteer caught up in the first bloody wave of civil war.

From Chauffeur, the witch doctor next door, to the AIDS demonstration’s wooden penis which becomes a mystical talisman, these adventures of a young volunteer – brave, honest, and horny – become a literary delight of laughter and tears you won’t want to end.

A WOMAN IN BERLIN by Anonymous

Berlin has fallen to the Russians. How do you stay alive in a conquered city where infants have no milk and any woman in sight is fair game?

You’ve never read anything quite like this boldly honest account of women surviving the horrors of military occupation. The writing is lean and sure, the story filled with unforgettable characters, in a confession illuminated by a complete lack of self-pity and a painstaking refusal to generalize about the Russian soldiers who take over their lives. You’ll lose your heart to this courageous, intelligent woman surviving by her brains and wits, living with the constant threat of casual rape, in a world of relentless, gnawing hunger. Originally met with outrage, her diary has at last been re-translated and revealed for what it is -- a wartime masterpiece.