Recommended+Fiction

=Recommended Fiction=

__**The Beautiful Ones are Not Yet Born**__ by Ayi Kewi Armah “Set during the last days of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first president and noted exponent of Pan-Africanism, this book chronicles the fortunes and misfortunes of "the man," the nameless focalizer of Armah's finely crafted novel, who struggles to retain some semblance of integrity, barely surviving in a country where corruption is "the national game." Intense, introspective, darkly melancholic but never misanthropic, Armah's novel celebrates a strong sense of hope in the midst of savage adversity, the small but not insignifcant victories that enable "the man" to live from day to day -- such existential Africana is a philosophy forged on the anvil of hard toil and experience.” (AR)


 * __Snow Country__** by Yasunari Kawabata “To this haunting novel of wasted love, Kawabata brings the brushstroke suggestiveness and astonishing grasp of motive that earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature. As he chronicles the affair between a wealthy dilettante and the mountain geisha who gives herself to him without illusions or regrets, one of Japan's greatest writers creates a work that is dense in implication and exalting in its sadness.” (AR) Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood by Richard E. Kim


 * __The Painted Bird__** by Jerzy Kosinski Independent People by Halldor Laxness “After learning by happenstance that Halldor Laxness was the first (and only) Icelander to win the Nobel Prize for literature, I impulsively purchased his magnum opus, Independent People. Delving into the harsh, unforgiving world of an isolated Icelandic shepherd, Bjartur of Summerhouses, I was overcome by the coldness of the nordic winters and the romance of those hardy flowers--the souls of people and sheep alike--that bloom in the omnipresent darkness. Not having much time to read, I was forced to put the book down temporarily until I actually went to Iceland on a family vacation, incidentally unrelated to my interest in Laxness. I read on as we drove through Iceland's countryside, a cold and treeless yet magnificent place where some people still believe trolls live in the uninhabited interior, glaciers creep towards the low fjords, and moss and lichen cling to the sharp lava flows--assertions of independence in themselves.” (AR)

Forgotten Fire by Adam Bagasarian “This breathtaking novel written from the view point of an Armenian boy during the genocide of WWI picks you up, runs you ragged and then drops you with haunted eyes and a shiver to live in your concience forever. The atrocities committed during this almost forgotten episode of history are shown with intensity and clarity so strongly that you must occasionally force yourself to blink before beginning the next sentance. Unbelievable, unforgettable, and more important than any book I have ever read. To understand history you must read this book; if you have not, you have missed something vital.” (AR)
 * __The End Play__** by Indira Mahindra “In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps--a community devoted exclusively to sickness--as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.” (AR)

__**Forgotten Fire**__ by Adam Bagasarian “This breathtaking novel written from the view point of an Armenian boy during the genocide of WWI picks you up, runs you ragged and then drops you with haunted eyes and a shiver to live in your concience forever. The atrocities committed during this almost forgotten episode of history are shown with intensity and clarity so strongly that you must occasionally force yourself to blink before beginning the next sentance. Unbelievable, unforgettable, and more important than any book I have ever read. To understand history you must read this book; if you have not, you have missed something vital.” (AR)


 * __Tree of Red Stars__** by Tessa Bridal “Tessa Bridal brings a fresh voice to Latin American literature in her first novel.... Bridal, who was born and raised in Uruguay, uses her book to present a harrowing account of that country's takeover by a military dictatorship, a regime that violently demolished one of Latin America's oldest democracies. As her story leads up to these dramatic events, Bridal describe s life in Montevideo through the eyes of Magda, a young woman from an upper-middle-class family who has lived a sheltered and secure existence--until the growing political unrest threatens to erupt even within her own wealthy neighborhood.” (NYT)


 * __Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress__** by Sijie Dai“The Cultural Revolution of Chairman Mao Zedong altered Chinese history in the 1960s and '70s, forcibly sending hundreds of thousands of Chinese intellectuals to peasant villages for "re-education." This moving, often wrenching short novel by a writer who was himself re-educated in the '70s tells how two young men weather years of banishment, emphasizing the power of literature to free the mind. Sijie's unnamed 17-year-old protagonist and his best friend, Luo, are bourgeois doctors' sons, and so condemned to serve four years in a remote mountain village, carrying pails of excrement daily up a hill. Only their ingenuity helps them to survive. The two friends are good at storytelling, and the village headman commands them to put on "oral cinema shows" for the villagers, reciting the plots and dialogue of movies. When another city boy leaves the mountains, the friends steal a suitcase full of forbidden books he has been hiding, knowing he will be afraid to call the authorities. Enchanted by the prose of a host of European writers, they dare to tell the story of The Count of Monte Cristo to the village tailor and to read Balzac to his shy and beautiful young daughter. Luo, who adores the Little Seamstress, dreams of transforming her from a simple country girl into a sophisticated lover with his foreign tales. He succeeds beyond his expectations, but the result is not what he might have hoped for, and leads to an unexpected, droll and poignant conclusion. The warmth and humor of Sijie's prose and the clarity of Rilke's translation distinguish this slim first novel, a wonderfully human tale.” (PW)

“Readers who are entranced by the sweeping Anglo sagas of Masterpiece Theatre will devour Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks's historical drama. A bestseller in England, there's even a little high-toned erotica thrown into the mix to convince the doubtful. The book's hero, a 20-year-old Englishman named Stephen Wraysford, finds his true love on a trip to Amiens in 1910. Unfortunately, she's already married, the wife of a wealthy textile baron. Wrayford convinces her to leave a life of passionless comfort to be at his side, but things do not turn out according to plan. Wraysford is haunted by this doomed affair and carries it with him into the trenches of World War I. Birdsong derives most of its power from its descriptions of mud and blood, and Wraysford's attempt to retain a scrap of humanity while surrounded by it. There is a simultaneous description of his present-day granddaughter's quest to read his diaries, which is designed to give some sense of perspective; this device is only somewhat successful. Nevertheless, Birdsong is an unflinching war story that is book-ended by romances and a rewarding read.” (AR)
 * __Birdsong__** by Sebastian Faulks

__**Shadow Lines**__ by Amitav Ghosh “A major novel on recent Indian political history, covers partition and violence in Bengal. Reflects post-colonial concerns with historical memory, symbolism, and cultural transition. Excellent reviews in the West and South Asia.” (AR)

__**The Feast of the Goat**__ by Mario Vargas Llosa “Mario Vargas Llosa, a former candidate for the presidency of Peru, is better placed than most novelists to write about the machinations of Latin American politics. In The Feast of the Goat he offers a vivid re-creation of the Dominican Republic during the final days of General Rafael Trujillo's insidious and evil regime.” (AR) Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar by Emily Reute “Set against a backdrop of political intrigue in the great age of European colonialism, Memoirs of An Arabian Princess From Zanzibar is an engrossing memoir offering a vivid portrait of 19th century Arab and African life. Life not only in the palace, but in the city and plantations as well. Emily Ruete (born in 1840 as Salme, Princess of Zanzibar and Oman, fled to Germany in 1856, changed her name, married her Germany lover, bore three children, and then widowed) provides a comparison between a woman's life in Moslem society and the conditions within the 19th century European bourgeoisie.”

__**A Long Way Gone**__ “This gripping story by a children's-rights advocate recounts his experiences as a boy growing up in Sierra Leone in the 1990s, during one of the most brutal and violent civil wars in recent history. Beah, a boy equally thrilled by causing mischief as by memorizing passages from Shakespeare and dance moves from hip-hop videos, was a typical precocious 12-year-old. But rebel forces destroyed his childhood innocence when they hit his village, driving him to leave his home and travel the arid deserts and jungles of Africa. After several months of struggle, he was recruited by the national army, made a full soldier and learned to shoot an AK-47, and hated everyone who came up against the rebels. The first two thirds of his memoir are frightening: how easy it is for a normal boy to transform into someone as addicted to killing as he is to the cocaine that the army makes readily available. But an abrupt change occurred a few years later when agents from the United Nations pulled him out of the army and placed him in a rehabilitation center. Anger and hate slowly faded away, and readers see the first glimmers of Beah's work as an advocate.”