Atlas of Unknowns
10 best books like Atlas of Unknowns (Tania James): The Barbarians are Coming, A Cab Called Reliable, The Writing on My Forehead, Steer Toward Rock, Love Marriage, Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents, Charlie Chan Is Dead 2: At Home in the World (An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction-- Revised and Updated), The Immortals, Karma and Other Stories, Home Boy
The Barbarians are Coming
| Author | David Wong Louie |
| ISBN | 0425178285 |
Sterling Lung grew up in the back of his parent's laundry dreaming about being a real American while speaking Chinese to his mother, English to his friends, and very little to the father he seemed always to disappoint.
Now twenty-six and a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, Sterling...
| Author | Patti Kim |
| ISBN | 0312190301 |
An affecting if uneven debut in which a Korean girl, newly immigrated to the US, struggles to transcend the chaos of a strange land and of a violent, overstressed family. Ever since Ahn Joo arrived in Arlington, Virginia, with her parents and younger brother, her parents have fought unceasingly about...
The Writing on My Forehead
| Author | Nafisa Haji |
| ISBN | 0061493856 |
Saira Qader es la hija rebelde de una pareja de indo-paquistaníes musulmanes que viven en Los Ángeles. Al contrario que su hermana Amina, Saira lucha por preservar su independencia y hallar un equilibrio entre su voluntad y la de sus progenitores. A medida que narra su propia historia, Saira revela...
| Author | Fae Myenne Ng |
| ISBN | 0786860979 |
"The woman I loved wasn't in love with me; the woman I married wasn't a wife to me. Ilin Cheung was my wife on paper. In deed, she belonged to Yi-Tung Szeto. In debt, I also belonged to him. He was my father, paper too."Steer Toward Rock, Fae Myenne Ng's heartbreaking novel of unrequited love, tells the story...
| Author | V.V. Ganeshananthan |
| ISBN | 1400066697 |
In this globe-scattered Sri Lankan family, we speak of only two kinds of marriage. The first is the Arranged Marriage. The second is the Love Marriage. In reality, there is a whole spectrum in between, but most of us spend years running away from the first toward the second. [p. 3]
The daughter...
| Author | Minal Hajratwala |
| ISBN | 0618251294 |
An inspiring personal saga that explores the collisions of choice and history that led one unforgettable family to become immigrants. In this groundbreaking work, Minal Hajratwala mixes history, memoir, and reportage to explore the questions facing not only her own Indian family but that of every...
Charlie Chan Is Dead 2: At Home in the World (An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction-- Revised and Updated)
| Author | Jessica Hagedorn |
| ISBN | 0142003905 |
More than a decade after its initial publication, the groundbreaking anthology Charlie Chan Is Dead remains the best available source for contemporary Asian American fiction. Edited by acclaimed novelist and National Book Award nominee Jessica Hagedorn, Charlie Chan Is Dead 2: At Home in the World...
The award-winning author of A New World now gives us an incantatory novel—at once plaintive and comic—about the powerful undercurrent of cultural and familial tradition in a society enthralled with the future.
Bombay in the 1980s: Shyam Lal is a highly regarded voice teacher, trained...
| Author | Rishi Reddi |
| ISBN | 0060898828 |
Multigenerational and international, the characters in Reddi's unique stories long for the comfort of the past while building unfamiliar and friable new lives in America. Finding the right balance between traditional Indian culture and the allure of contemporary Western life becomes a high-stakes...
| Author | H.M. Naqvi |
| ISBN | 0307409104 |
They are renaissance men. They are bons vivants. They are three young Pakistani men in New York City at the turn of the millennium: AC, a gangsta-rap-spouting academic; Jimbo, a hulking Pushtun DJ from the streets of Jersey City; and Chuck, a wideeyed kid, fresh off the boat from the homeland, just trying...
| Author | Wendy Lee |
| ISBN | 0802170463 |
When Hua Wu arrives in New York City, her life seems destined to resemble that of countless immigrants before her. She spends her hectic days in a restaurant in Chinatown, and her lonesome nights in a noisy, crowded tenement, yearning for those she left behind. But one day in a park in the West Village,...
| Author | Tony D'Souza |
| ISBN | 0151015198 |
Francisco D'Sai is a firstborn son of a firstborn son—all the way back to the beginning of a long line of proud Konkans. Known as the "Jews of India," the Konkans kneeled before the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama's sword and before Saint Francis Xavier’s cross, abandoned their Hindu traditions,...
| Author | Bharati Mukherjee |
| ISBN | 0449220982 |
"Mukherjee writes with beautiful precision and just the right density of detail. There is an unlikely marriage of Jane Austen and Nathaniel West in her words."
THE VILLAGE VOICE
"Dimple Dasgupta had set her heart on marrying a neurosurgeon, but her father was looking for engineers in the matrimonial...
| Author | Jaspreet Singh |
| ISBN | 1608190854 |
Kirpal Singh is riding the slow train to Kashmir. With India passing by his window, he reflects on his destination, which is also his past: a military camp to which he has not returned for fourteen years.
Kirpal, called Kip, is shy and not yet twenty when he arrives for the first time at General...
| Author | Raj Kamal Jha |
| ISBN | 0156010887 |
In the middle of a steamy Calcutta night the phone rings. An unnamed man in a city of millions answers to a voice telling him that his long-lost sister is dead. He must go to the hospital to identify the body and claim his sister's orphaned newborn daughter until she can be adopted the next day.
During...
| Author | Bich Minh Nguyen |
| ISBN | 0670020818 |
A mesmerizing novel about estranged sisters and the cultural and family history that binds them
Van and Linny Luong are as baffling to each other as their parents' Vietnamese legacy is to them both. Van, the quintessential overachiever, has applied the same studied diligence to her law career...
| Author | Helena María Viramontes |
| ISBN | 0743287665 |
Award-winning author of "Under the Feet of Jesus," Helena Maria Viramontes offers a profoundly gritty portrait of everyday life in L.A. in this lyrically muscular, artfully crafted novel.In the barrio of East Los Angeles, a group of unbreakable young women struggle to find their way through the turbulent...
| Author | Anand Giridharadas |
| ISBN | 0805091777 |
Reversing his parents' immigrant path, a young American-born writer returns to India and discovers an old country making itself new
Anand Giridharadas sensed something was afoot as his plane from America prepared to land in Bombay. An elderly passenger looked at him and said, "We're all...
Rakesh Ahuja, a Government Minister in New Delhi, is beset by problems: thirteen children and another on the way; a wife who mourns the loss of her favorite TV star; and a teenaged son with some really strong opinions about family planning.
To make matters worse, looming over this comical farrago...
| Author | Shaheen Ashraf-Ahmed |
Mirza is a middle-aged Indian college professor whose wife has left him. He moves out of his house into a tent in his back garden, where he sets up an outdoor classroom and serves tea to his kind but bewildered neighbors. He is visited by the irritable spirit of his long-dead teacher, Khan Sahib, who is befuddled...
| Author | Thrity Umrigar |
| ISBN | 8172234635 |
I've been a fan of Thrity Umrigar for several years. Her fiction is masterful. She is a professor at CWRU, and I've wanted to read her memoir ever since I heard her speak at a book signing.
It starts out in a rather depressing fashion, with descriptions of Thrity's raging mother who likes to beat...
| Author | Narendra Jadhav |
| ISBN | 0743270797 |
Every sixth human being in the world today is an Indian, and every sixth Indian is an untouchable. For thousands of years the untouchables, or Dalits, the people at the bottom of the Hindu caste system, have been treated as subhuman. Their story has rarely been told. This remarkable book achieves something...
| Author | Amit Majmudar |
| ISBN | 0805093958 |
A stunning first novel, set during the violent 1947 partition of India, about uprooted children and their journeys to safety
As India is rent into two nations, communal violence breaks out on both sides of the new border and streaming hordes of refugees flee from blood and chaos. At an overrun train...
