A year of reading the world
Top 10 A year of reading the world
: Like Water for Chocolate, Hunger, Cloudstreet, Death and the Penguin, The Year of the Hare, The Forty Rules of Love, Too Loud a Solitude, An African in Greenland, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives, The Last Brother
| Author | Laura Esquivel |
| ISBN | 0552995878 |
Earthy, magical, and utterly charming, this tale of family life in turn-of-the-century Mexico became a best-selling phenomenon with its winning blend of poignant romance and bittersweet wit.
The number one bestseller in Mexico and America for almost two years, and subsequently a bestseller...
| Author | Knut Hamsun |
| ISBN | 0486431681 |
One of the most important and controversial writers of the 20th century, Knut Hamsun made literary history with the publication in 1890 of this powerful, autobiographical novel recounting the abject poverty, hunger and despair of a young writer struggling to achieve self-discovery and its ultimate...
| Author | Tim Winton |
| ISBN | 0743234413 |
Hailed as a classic, Tim Winton's masterful family saga is both a paean to working-class Australians and an unflinching examination of the human heart's capacity for sorrow, joy, and endless gradations in between. An award-winning work, Cloudstreet exemplifies the brilliant ability of fiction...
| Author | Andrey Kurkov |
| ISBN | 1860469450 |
Viktor is an aspiring writer with only Misha, his pet penguin, for company. Although he would prefer to write short stories, he earns a living composing obituaries for a newspaper. He longs to see his work published, yet the subjects of his obituaries continue to cling to life. But when he opens the newspaper...
| Author | Arto Paasilinna |
| ISBN | 0720612772 |
ENGLISH (The Year of the Hare) / ITALIANO
Vatanen, a Finnish journalist, is in conflict with his life. The dissatisfaction comes out one day after hitting a hare. After rescue the wild animal, inexplicably Vatanen running through the woods together with his new friend. He starts down a path...
In this lyrical, exuberant follow-up to her 2007 novel, The Bastard of Istanbul, acclaimed Turkish author Elif Shafak unfolds two tantalizing parallel narratives—one contemporary and the other set in the thirteenth century, when Rumi encountered his spiritual mentor, the whirling dervish...
| Author | Bohumil Hrabal |
| ISBN | 0349102627 |
TOO LOUD A SOLITUDE is a tender and funny story of Haňťa - a man who has lived in a Czech police state - for 35 years, working as compactor of wastepaper and books. In the process of compacting, he has acquired an education so unwitting he can't quite tell which of his thoughts are his own and which come from...
| Author | Tété-Michel Kpomassie |
| ISBN | 0940322889 |
Tété-Michel Kpomassie was a teenager in Togo when he discovered a book about Greenland—and knew that he must go there. Working his way north over nearly a decade, Kpomassie finally arrived in the country of his dreams. This brilliantly observed and superbly entertaining record of his adventures...
The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives
| Author | Lola Shoneyin |
| ISBN | 0061946370 |
African-born poet Lola Shoneyin makes her fiction debut with The Secret Lives of Babi Segi’s Wives, a perceptive, entertaining, and eye-opening novel of polygamy in modern-day Nigeria. The struggles, rivalries, intricate family politics, and the interplay of personalities and relationships...
| Author | Nathacha Appanah |
| ISBN | 1555975755 |
In The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah, 1944 is coming to a close and nine-year-old Raj is unaware of the war devastating the rest of the world. He lives in Mauritius, a remote island in the Indian Ocean, where survival is a daily struggle for his family. When a brutal beating lands Raj in the hospital of...
Signs Preceding the End of the World
| Author | Yuri Herrera |
| ISBN | 1908276428 |
Yuri Herrera explores the crossings and translations people make in their minds and language as they move from one country to another, especially when there’s no going back.
Traversing this lonely territory is Makina, a young woman who knows only too well how to survive in a violent, macho...
| Author | Nicole Brossard |
| ISBN | 1552451720 |
First published in 1987, Nicole Brossard's classic novel returns to Coach House in a new edition. A seminal text in Canadian and feminist literature, Mauve Desert is a must-read for readers and writers alike.
This is both a single novel and three separate novels in one. In the first, Mauve Desert,...
| Author | Dương Thu Hương |
| ISBN | 0140255109 |
A piercing, unforgettable tale of the horror and spiritual weariness of war, Novel Without a Name will shatter every preconception Americans have about what happened in the jungles of Vietnam. With Duong Thu Huong, whose Paradise of the Blind was published to high critical acclaim in 1993, Vietnam...
| Author | Bessie Head |
| ISBN | 0435907204 |
"Your mother was insane. If you're not careful you'll get insane just like your mother. Your mother was a white woman. They had to lock her up, as she was having a child by the stable boy who was a native." It is never clear to Elizabeth whether the mission school principal's cruel revelation of her origins...
The Last Will & Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo
| Author | Germano Almeida |
| ISBN | 0811215652 |
New Directions is proud to introduce the masterwork of Cape Verde's greatest living writer, Germano Almeida: an ironic and original tragic-comedy from a new voice in African literature. Everyone in Cape Verde knows Señor da Silva. Successful entrepreneur, owner of the island's first automobile,...
In the United States of Africa
| Author | Abdourahman A. Waberi |
| ISBN | 0803222629 |
In a literary reversal as deadly serious as it is wickedly satiric, this novel by the acclaimed French-speaking African writer Abdourahman A. Waberi turns the fortunes of the world upside down. On this reimagined globe a stream of sorry humanity flows from the West, from the slums of America and the...
| Author | Vaddey Ratner |
| ISBN | 1451657706 |
Displaying the author's extraordinary gift for language, In the Shadow of the Banyan is testament to the transcendent power of narrative and a brilliantly wrought tale of human resilience.
For seven-year-old Raami, the shattering end of childhood begins with the footsteps of her father...
| Author | Faïza Guène |
| ISBN | 0156030489 |
He thought I'd forged my mom's name on the slip. How stupid is that? On this thing Mom just made a kind of squiggly shape on the page. That jerk didn't even think about what he was saying, didn't even ask himself why her signature might be weird. He's one of those people who think illiteracy is like AIDS. It...
| Author | Hilda Hilst |
| ISBN | 1612193455 |
A short, stunning book by a Brazilian master of the avant-garde.
Something has changed in Amos Keres, a university mathematics professor—his sentences trail off in class, he is disgusted by the sight of his wife and son, and he longs to flee the comfortable bourgeois life he finds himself...
| Author | Roberto Saviano |
| ISBN | 0374165270 |
A groundbreaking major bestseller in Italy, Gomorrah is Roberto Saviano's gripping nonfiction account of the decline of Naples under the rule of the Camorra, an organized crime network with a large international reach and stakes in construction, high fashion, illicit drugs, and toxic-waste disposal....
Amie: An African Adventure
Alternative cover edition of ASIN: B00LWFIO5K
Amie was just an average girl, living in her home town close to friends and family. She was happily married and she had her future all planned out. They would have two adorable children, while she made award winning programmes for television. Until...
| Author | Michael David Lukas |
| ISBN | 0062012096 |
An elegantly crafted, utterly enchanting debut novel set in a mystical, exotic world, in which a gifted young girl charms a sultan and changes the course of an empire's history Late in the summer of 1877, a flock of purple-and-white hoopoes suddenly appears over the town of Constanta on the Black Sea,...
