Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe comes from a tiny Japanese hamlet where storytelling was a prominent tradition; he also learned the national mythology of Japan when he went to school. At university, he studied French literature and was impressed by the grotesque imagery of Rabelais....

Michael Ondaatje is one of the few authors who has managed to garner almost equal critical success in the mediums of both prose and poetry. In both, his trademark is a kind of lush imagery, which makes for dense, yet utterly absorbing, reads. Influenced by his childhood in Sri Lanka,...

Abraham Verghese was born in Ethiopia, began his medical training there, and then began his American medical career in the smaller hospitals and communities that were among the few options for immigrant doctors. He launched his career as a writer from those experiences,...

Megha Majumdar - Vintage
Format: Book

Jivan is a Muslim girl from the slums, determined to move up in life, who is accused of executing a terrorist attack on a train because of a careless comment on Facebook. P.T. Sir is an opportunistic gym teacher who hitches his aspirations to a right-wing political party and finds that...

Ayad Akhtar - Back Bay Books
Format: Book

A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart...

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers - Harper
Format: Book

The great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America, and what he called "Double Consciousness," a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois's words...

Keum Suk Gendry-Kim - Drawn and Quarterly
Format: Book

This true story of a Korean comfort woman documents how the atrocity of war devastates women's lives. Grass is a powerful antiwar graphic novel, telling the life story of a Korean girl named Okseon Lee who was forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese Imperial Army...

MIN JIN LEE - Grand Central Publishing
Format: Book

In this bestselling, page-turning saga, four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family fight to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan, exiled from a home they never knew. In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger...

Amitav Ghosh - Picador
Format: Book

At the heart of this vibrant saga is a vast ship, the Ibis. Her destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean shortly before the outbreak of the Opium Wars in China. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a diverse cast of Indians and Westerners on board, from...

Isabel Allende - Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Format: Book

An historical novel set at the end of the nineteenth century in Chile, Portrait in Sepia is a family saga that continues the story begun in Allende’s highly acclaimed Daughter of Fortune. Recounted in the voice of a young woman in search of her roots, Portrait...

Nguyen Phan Que Mai - Algonquin Books
Format: Book

In 1969, sisters Trang and Quỳnh, desperate to help their parents pay off debts, leave their rural village and become "bar girls" in Sài Gòn, drinking, flirting (and more) with American GIs in return for money. As the war moves closer to the city, the once-innocent...

Judy Blume - Vintage
Format: Book

In this brilliant new novel, Judy Blume takes us back to the 1950s and introduces us to the town of Elizabeth, New Jersey, where she herself grew up. Here she imagines and weaves together a vivid portrait of three generations of families, friends, and strangers, whose lives are profoundly...

Alan Brennert - St. Martin's Griffin
Format: Book

This richly imagined novel, set in Hawai'i more than a century ago, is an extraordinary epic of a little-known time and place---and a deeply moving testament to the resiliency of the human spirit. Rachel Kalama, a spirited seven-year-old Hawaiian girl, dreams of visiting far-off...

Brit Bennett - Riverhead Books
Format: Book

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities,...

Ayana Mathis - ‎Vintage; Reprint edition
Format: Book

In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd, swept up by the tides of the Great Migration, flees Georgia and heads north. Full of hope, she settles in Philadelphia to build a better life. Instead she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment, and watches helplessly as her firstborn...

Asha Lemmie - Dutton
Format: Book

The child of a married Japanese aristocrat and her African American GI lover, Nori is an outsider from birth. Her grandparents take her in, only to conceal her, fearful of a stain on the royal pedigree that they are desperate to uphold in a changing Japan. Obedient to a fault, Nori accepts...

Kenzaburo Oe - Grove Press
Format: Book

K is a famous writer living in Tokyo with his wife and three children, one of whom is mentally disabled. K's wife confronts him with the information that this child, Eeyore, has been doing disturbing things -- behaving aggressively, asserting that he's dead, even brandishing...

Michael Ondaatje - Vintage
Format: Book

Anil's Ghost transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of civil war. Into this maelstrom steps Anil Tissera, a young woman born in Sri Lanka, educated in England and America, who returns to her homeland...

Charmaine Wilkerson - Random House
Format: Paperback

We can't choose what we inherit. But can we choose who we become? In present-day California, Eleanor Bennett's death leaves behind a puzzling inheritance for her two children, Byron and Benny: a black cake, made from a family recipe with a long history, and a voice recording. In...