You’ve Changed

In this electric debut essay collection, a Myanmar millennial playfully challenges us to examine the knots and complications of immigration status, eating habits, Western feminism in an Asian home, and more, guiding us toward an expansive idea of what it means to be a Myanmar woman today.

What does it mean to be a Myanmar person—a baker, swimmer, writer and woman—on your own terms rather than those of the colonizer? These irreverent yet vulnerable essays ask that question by tracing the journey of a woman who spent her young adulthood in the US and UK before returning to her hometown of Yangon, where she still lives.

In You’ve Changed, Pyae takes on romantic relationships whose futures are determined by different passports, switching accents in American taxis, the patriarchal Myanmar concept of hpone which governs how laundry is done, swimming as refuge from mental illness, pleasure and shame around eating rice, and baking in a kitchen far from white America’s imagination.

Throughout, she wrestles with the question of who she is—a Myanmar woman in the West, a Western-educated person in Yangon, a writer who refuses to be labeled a “race writer.” With intimate and funny prose, Pyae shows how the truth of identity may be found not in stability, but in its gloriously unsettled nature.

“A fresh and insightful debut.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Readers are gifted a funny, insightful, and beautifully written collection of essays . . . A must for your bookshelf . . . Incisive and exciting.” —Sarah Neilson, Shondaland

“Decisive and deft . . . Reading You’ve Changed is akin to conversing late into the night with an intelligent friend.” —Jisu Kim, LIBER: A Feminist Review

“A vivacious debut nonfiction collection showcasing wise-beyond-her-years insight (she’s 25 in her first essay), biting impatience, and plenty of unfiltered humor . . . Illuminating, entertaining essays about coming of age between languages, cultures, and born-into and chosen families.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Thought-provoking, poignant, and a delight to read . . . A refreshingly honest, original exploration of personal identity.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

(A special thank you to book club member, Karen Van Drie for the suggestion.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org

Bones Will Crow

On a rooftop
Under the moon
My soul sits like an aristocrat
While my body rests
In a dimly lit corner.
—Aung Cheimt

“An illuminating account of real Myanmar narrated by uncensored and often deviant Burmese, who dare to dream and challenge the norms. Myanmar Studies scholars and literature fans often lament the lack of authentic Burmese voices in print, accessible to the world outside Burma. Bones will Crow not only fills this gap but also presents the readers a counter-narrative of 'exotic' Burma often associated with golden pagodas and smiling faces. Daily struggles under crony capitalism, confronting commercialization of female bodies, an exile's homesickness, issues Burmese grapple with leap out of the pages of this anthology. This anthology is a long overdue, much-welcomed addition.” —Tharapi Than, PhD, Teaching Fellow and Lector in Burmese (University of London)

This is the first anthology of contemporary Burmese poets published in the West, and includes the work of Burmese poets who have been in exile and in prison. The poems include global references from a culture in which foreign books and the internet are regarded with suspicion and where censorship is an industry. The poets have been ingenious in their use of metaphor to escape surveillance and censorship, writing post-modern, avant-garde, performance and online poetries. Through their wildly diverse styles, these poems delight in the freedom to experiment with poetic tradition.

“A highly-anticipated anthology of 15 diverse Burmese poets spanning several generations, whose contribution to the continual fight against the suppression of democracy and free speech is even more necessary now. These poets are essential reading for the wider world for their historical perspective and experimental approaches to poetry and poetics.” —Poetry Review

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org

Letters from Burma

In these astonishing letters, Aung San Suu Kyi reaches out beyond Burma’s* borders to paint for her readers a vivid and poignant picture of her native land. Here, she celebrates the courageous army officers, academics, actors and everyday people who have supported the National League for Democracy, often at great risk to their own lives. She reveals the impact of political decisions on the people of Burma, from the terrible cost to the children of imprisoned dissidents—allowed to see their parents for only fifteen minutes every fortnight—to the effect of inflation on the national diet and of state repression on traditions of hospitality. She also evokes the beauty of the country’s seasons and scenery, customs and festivities that remain so close to her heart. Through these remarkable letters, the reader catches a glimpse of exactly what is at stake as Suu Kyi fights on for freedom in Burma, and of the love for her homeland that sustains her non-violent battle.

Aung San Suu Kyi is the leader if the struggle for human rights and democracy in Burma. Born in 1945 as the daughter of Burma’s national hero Aung San, she was two years old when he was assassinated, just before Burma gained the independence to which he has dedicated his life. She herself was placed under house arrest in Rangoon in 1989, where she remained for almost 15 of the 21 years until her release in 2010, becoming one of the world’s most prominent political prisoners & a Nobel Peace prize winner.

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org

*P.S. Confused why this book refers to Burma & not Myanmar? As noted by AP News in the article, Myanmar, Burma and why the different names matter: “For generations, the country was called Burma, after the dominant Burman ethnic group. But in 1989, one year after the ruling junta brutally suppressed a pro-democracy uprising, military leaders suddenly changed its name to Myanmar. By then, Burma was an international pariah, desperate for any way to improve its image. Hoping for a sliver of legitimacy, it said it was discarding a name handed down from its colonial past and to foster ethnic unity. The old name, officials said, excluded the country’s many ethnic minorities.

At home, though, it changed nothing. In the Burmese language, ‘Myanmar’ is simply the more formal version of ‘Burma. The country’s name was changed only in English.

It was linguistic sleight-of-hand. But few people were fooled. Much of the world showed defiance of the junta by refusing to use the new name. Over the years, many countries and news outlets, including The Associated Press, had begun using the country’s official name. As repression eased and international opposition to the military became less vocal, ‘Myanmar’ became increasingly common. Inside the country, opposition leaders made clear it didn’t matter much anymore. Unlike most of the world, the U.S. government still officially uses ‘Burma.’ But even Washington has started to mellow its stance. In 2012, during a visit to the country, then-President Barack Obama used both ‘Burma’ and ‘Myanmar.’”

Memoir

Note: This is a unique book & a treasure because it was the only one we could find from a native Lao author! In addition, he is Hmong, which is an indigenous group in Southeast & East Asia with a rich culture & language that originated in China before migration began in the 19th century.

While Wang Yee Vang was born in Laos, he, like a number of his countrymen, was recruited to join the US Secret Army defending US national security interests from 1961 to 1975. First training in Thailand, he returned to Laos to fight in “The Secret War”, a covert CIA-backed effort to seize power from Communists during the Vietnam War. Vang rose up thru the ranks in the army before attaining the rank of Colonel and the fall of Laos when he left the country eventually settling in the US. He then went on to found Lao Veterans of America, a Lao- and Hmong-American veterans’ non-profit organization.

From the preface: “I wrote this memoir because many of my colleagues suggested, while I was working for Lao and Hmong communities inside and outside Laos for decades, that I should tell the young generations what happened and why some 500,000 Lao citizens became refugees and immigrated to Western countries.

I noted what I remembered and what I faced while I was working for the Royal Lao Government because I was one of the regular officers. My civil grade and military rank were given by the king of Laos, which we called royal ordinance.

I hope that this work would help our young generations in doing some research. May it help them accomplish their goals and the works that they need to accomplish. Thank you for reading this memoir.”

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org

Stay Alive, My Son

On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh to open a new and appalling chapter in the story of the twentieth century. On that day, Pin Yathay was a qualified engineer in the Ministry of Public Works. Successful and highly educated, he had been critical of the corrupt Lon Nol regime and hoped that the Khmer Rouge would be the patriotic saviors of Cambodia.In Stay Alive, My Son, Pin Yathay provides an unforgettable testament of the horror that ensued and a gripping account of personal courage, sacrifice and survival.

Documenting the 27 months from the arrival of the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh to his escape into Thailand, Pin Yathay is a powerful and haunting memoir of Cambodia's killing fields. With 17 members of his family, Pin Yathay was evacuated by the Khmer Rouge from Phnom Penh, his family taking with them whatever they might need for the three days before they would be allowed to return to their home. Instead, they were moved on from camp to camp, their possessions confiscated or abandoned. As days became weeks and weeks became months, they became the “New People,” displaced urban dwellers compelled to live and work as peasants, their days were filled with forced manual labor and their survival dependent on ever more meager communal rations. The body count mounted, first as malnutrition bred rampant disease and then as the Khmer Rouge singled out the dissidents for sudden death in the darkness.

Eventually, Pin Yathay's family was reduced from 17 to just himself, his wife, and their one remaining son, Nawath. Wracked with pain and disease, robbed of all they had owned, living on the very edge of dying, they faced a future of escalating horror. With Nawath too ill to travel, Pin Yathay and his wife, Any, had to make the heart-breaking decision whether to leave him to the care of a Cambodian hospital in order to make a desperate break for freedom. “Stay alive, my son,” he tells Nawath before embarking on a nightmarish escape to the Thai border.

“During the Kampuchean revolutionary madness... all the urban population was driven out to work in the country, creating new peasant communities which operated on strict, dogmatic Maoist lines.... Pin Yathay's story is told with no attempt at self-aggrandizement.... For he has to live with the shame of having deserted his own child in order to facilitate his escape, of losing his wife in the jungle through ineptitude: it is a revelation of prehistoric strength within the human conscience which is far beyond our imaginings.” —Times Literary Supplement

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org

Survival in the Killing Fields

Note: If this book is chosen as a club read, it will be read over 2 months since it is a longer book.

“Nothing has shaped my life as much as surviving the Pol Pot regime. I am a survivor of the Cambodian holocaust. That’s who I am,” says Haing Ngor. And in his memoir, Survival in the Killing Fields, he tells the gripping and frequently terrifying story of his term in the hell created by the communist Khmer Rouge. Like Dith Pran, the Cambodian doctor and interpreter whom Ngor played in an Oscar-winning performance in The Killing Fields, Ngor lived through the atrocities that the 1984 film portrayed. Like Pran, too, Ngor was a doctor by profession, and he experienced firsthand his country’s wretched descent, under the Khmer Rouge, into senseless brutality, slavery, squalor, starvation, and disease —all of which are recounted in sometimes unimaginable horror in Ngor’s poignant memoir. Since the original publication of this searing personal chronicle, Haing Ngor’s life has ended with his murder, which has never been satisfactorily solved. In an epilogue written especially for this new edition, Ngor’s coauthor, Roger Warner, offers a glimpse into this complex, enigmatic man’s last years—years that he lived “like his country: scarred, and incapable of fully healing.”

The best book on Cambodia that has ever been published.

“For his role in the film The Killing Fields, Haing Ngor, a Cambodian doctor with no acting experience, won an Oscar. In playing the part, he drew on his own tormented life as a war slave during the Cambodian civil war. His book is a very demanding read, but it is of such high merit and rare importance that it deserves a place in every collection. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org

The American Granddaughter

Winner of France’s Lagardère Prize, short-listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction

In her award-winning novel, Inaam Kachachi portrays the dual tragedy of her native land: America’s failure and the humiliation of Iraq.

The American Granddaughter depicts the American occupation of Iraq through the eyes of a young Iraqi-American woman, who returns to her country as an interpreter for the US Army. Through the narrator’s conflicting emotions, we see the tragedy of a country which, having battled to emerge from dictatorship, then finds itself under foreign occupation.

At the beginning of America’s occupation of Iraq, Zeina returns to her war-torn homeland as an interpreter for the US Army. Her formidable grandmother—the only family member that Zeina believes she has in Iraq—gravely disapproves of her granddaughter’s actions. Then Zeina meets Haider and Muhaymin, two “brothers” she knows nothing of, and falls deeply in love with Muhaymin, a militant in the Al Mehdi Army. These experiences force her to question all her values.

“We let ourselves be won over by this novel that describes with such faithfulness and emotion the tearing apart of a country and a woman forever caught between two shores. The book poetically explores the stinging sorrow of grasping at the past, the link between language and identity, and the tragic loss of never being able to truly go home again.” —AramcoWorld

(A special thank you to book club member, Jordi Valbuena for the suggestion.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org

The Baghdad Clock

Shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction 2018, winner of the Edinburgh First Book Award

Baghdad, 1991. The Gulf War is raging. Two girls, hiding in an air raid shelter, tell stories to keep the fear and the darkness at bay, and a deep friendship is born. But as the bombs continue to fall and friends begin to flee the country, the girls must face the fact that their lives will never be the same again.

This poignant debut novel reveals just what it's like to grow up in a city that is slowly disappearing in front of your eyes, and how in the toughest times, children can build up the greatest resilience.

“Vivid, at times surreal… this novel confronts the reality of Baghdad in the final decade of the twentieth century through the vision of a girl who often imbues it with wonder and beauty.” – TLS

“With tremendous talent and a sharp intelligence, Al Rawi delivers an outstanding debut. Highly recommended.” –Library Journal (starred review)

“This stirring debut follows two girls and their lives as they grow up in the war-torn city of Iraq. A poignant portrayal of the enduring bond of friendship, infused with a touch of magical realism.” —Book Riot

“Al Rawi’s debut presents the so-called enemy imbued with childhood whimsy and human longing, their quotidian stories embellished with touches of magic realism. Rendered into English by Harvard professor Leafgren, who was inspired by 9/11 to learn Arabic, this international bestseller is both condemnation against politics and war and testimony to resilient humanity.” —Booklist

“[Shahad Al Rawi] has skilfully interwoven fantasy and reality with a fine thread. She draws you through the story, leading you from one maze into another, as you stagger along in a state of perplexity, amazement and sheer delight.” —al-Watan

(A special thank you to book club member, LeeAnn Marshall Gilbert for the suggestion.)

View on Amazon | Unavailable from Bookshop.org

Baghdad Noir

The Best International Crime Fiction of 2018

While all Iraqis will readily agree that their life has always been noir, the majority of the stories in Baghdad Noir are set in the years following the American invasion of 2003, though one story is set in 1950 and three are set in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet it is this recent history of Iraq—over the last few decades—that serves to inform its present . . . Cementing the destruction of Iraqi life was Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. But that was hardly the end of Iraq’s noir story. In April 2003, the US invasion, though it precipitated the end of Saddam’s dictatorial rule, killed off any possibility of a secular, modern Iraq once and for all.

Taken as a whole, the stories in Baghdad Noir testify to the enduring resilience of the Iraqi spirit amid an ongoing, real-life milieu of despair that the literary form of noir can at best only approximate. Yet the contributions here manage to hold their own as individual stories, where the rich traditions of intersecting cultures transcend the immediate political reality—even while being simultaneously informed by it. Much like the diverse tapestry of cultures that join together on the banks of the Tigris to form the City of Peace, Baghdad Noir reveals that there’s nothing monolithic or ordinary about the voices of its writers. 

“The collection goes so far beyond the Iraq most of us have been exposed to over the last 20 years and offers up a vision of this important world city in all its complexity and humanity. Crime fiction may not have a long tradition in Iraqi literature, but the authors assembled here embrace the finest noir traditions by shining a critical, incisive light on their city, ravaged by war and discord but full of moments of life and hope, some fulfilled, others crushed. This is a vital book, in every sense of the word.” —CrimeReads

“Among them these writers encompass, if not a Baghdad entire, then at least a Baghdad of diverse experiences and perspectives, and absolutely a Baghdad focused on the Arabic world and not the Western.” —NPR Books

(Group read suggestion from Julie Jacobs, book club moderator.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org

The Corpse Washer

Longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2014; winner of the 2014 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation

Young Jawad, born to a traditional Shi’ite family of corpse washers and shrouders in Baghdad, decides to abandon the family tradition, choosing instead to become a sculptor—to celebrate life rather than tend to death. He enters Baghdad’s Academy of Fine Arts in the late 1980s, in defiance of his father’s wishes and determined to forge his own path. But the circumstances of history dictate otherwise. Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and the economic sanctions of the 1990s destroy the socioeconomic fabric of society. The 2003 invasion and military occupation unleash sectarian violence. Corpses pile up, and Jawad returns to the inevitable washing and shrouding. Trained as an artist to shape materials to represent life aesthetically, he now must contemplate how death shapes daily life and the bodies of Baghdad’s inhabitants.
 
Through the struggles of a single desperate family, Sinan Antoon’s novel shows us the heart of Iraq’s complex and violent recent history. Descending into the underworld where the borders between life and death are blurred and where there is no refuge from unending nightmares, Antoon limns a world of great sorrows, a world where the winds wail.

“Sinan Antoon’s self-translated (from Arabic) novel . . . is a book that comes bearing bittersweet gifts. The story can only be described as a tragedy of accumulated loss, but the language Antoon employs—simple, direct, fiercely poetic—is an affirmation of life and culture.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Antoon gives us a remarkable novel that in 184 pages captures the experience of an Iraqi everyman who has lived through the war with Iran in the first half of the 1980s, the 1991 Gulf War over the Kuwaiti invasion, and then the 2003 war.”—Three Percent

(A special thank you to book club member, Eydis West for the suggestion.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org

The Last Girl

Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize

Nadia Murad was born and raised in Kocho, a small village of farmers and shepherds in northern Iraq. A member of the Yazidi community, she and her brothers and sisters lived a quiet life. Nadia had dreams of becoming a history teacher or opening her own beauty salon.

On August 15th, 2014, when Nadia was just 21 years old, this life ended. Islamic State militants massacred the people of her village, executing men who refused to convert to Islam and women too old to become sex slaves. Six of Nadia’s brothers were killed, and her mother soon after, their bodies swept into mass graves. Nadia was taken to Mosul and forced, along with thousands of other Yazidi girls, into the ISIS slave trade.

Nadia would be held captive by several militants and repeatedly raped and beaten. Finally, she managed a narrow escape through the streets of Mosul, finding shelter in the home of a Sunni Muslim family whose eldest son risked his life to smuggle her to safety.

Today, Nadia’s story—as a witness to the Islamic State’s brutality, a survivor of rape, a refugee, a Yazidi—has forced the world to pay attention to an ongoing genocide. It is a call to action, a testament to the human will to survive, and a love letter to a lost country, a fragile community, and a family torn apart by war.

“This devastating memoir unflinchingly recounts Murad’s experiences and questions the complicity of witnesses who acquiesced in the suffering of others.” —The New Yorker

“This is likely the most inspiring feminist memoir out this year.” —Bustle

“A harrowing and brave book, a testament to human resilience.” —The Progressive

“Powerful. . . . A heartbreaking elegy to a lost community.” —Booklist

(Group read suggestion from Beth McCrea, book club co-founder.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org

The Last of the Angels

From a legendary writer both beloved and banished by Iraq—a fine work of Arabic literature in the vein of Naguib Mahfouz and Elias Khoury, and a magical and moving comic novel about the birth of modern Iraq.

Kirkuk, Iraq, the 1950s. The day Hameed Nylon loses his job, and gains an unfortunate nickname, is the day that his life begins: dismissed as a chauffeur when rumors surface that he propositioned his British boss's posh-tart wife, Hameed finds his true calling as a revolutionary in an Iraq that is destined for a sea change. Also bent on bucking the system is Hameed's brother-in-law, the money-scheming butcher Khidir Musa, who runs off suddenly to Russia to find two brothers who have been missing since World War I. And the key to their fate is held by a seven-year-old boy, Burhan Abdallah, who stumbles upon an old chest in his attic that allows him to speak with three white-robed old men, beings who inform him that they are, in fact, angels.

"The Last of the Angels is a life experience....The novel's language is an unbroken flow that seduces you right up to the final page of this magnificent tale. And in telling the story, its details sparkle with every description, every sentence, and every page." —Al-Zaman (London)

(A special thank you to book club member, Elke Richelsen for the suggestion.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org

Free

Named a Best Book of the Year by the New Yorker, Washington Post, Financial Times, Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, Sunday Times, and more

An astonishing and deeply resonant memoir that is by turns "bitingly, if darkly, funny…and truly profound" (NY Times), Lea Ypi writes about growing up in the last days of the last Stalinist outpost of the 20th century.

Family and nation formed a reliable bedrock of security for precocious 11-year-old Lea. She was a Young Pioneer, helping to lead her country toward the future of perfect freedom promised by the leaders of her country, the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania. Then, almost overnight, the Berlin Wall fell and the pillars of her society toppled. The local statue of Stalin, whom she had believed to be a kindly leader who loved children, was beheaded by student protestors.

Uncomfortable truths about her family’s background emerged. Lea learned that when her parents had spoken in whispers of friends going to “university” or relatives “dropping out,” they meant something much more sinister. As she learned the truth about her family’s past, her best friend fled the country. Together with neighboring post-Communist states, Albania began a messy transition to join the “free markets” of the Western world: a dystopia of pyramid schemes, organized crime, and sex trafficking. Her father, despite his radical left-wing convictions, was forced to fire workers; her mother became a conservative politician on the model of Margaret Thatcher. Lea’s typical teen concerns about relationships and the future were shot through with the existential: the nation was engulfed in civil war.

Ypi’s outstanding literary gifts enable her to weave together this colorful, tumultuous coming-of-age story in a time of social upheaval with thoughtful, fresh, and invigorating perspective on the relation between the personal and the political.

"Riveting. . .A wonderfully funny and poignant portrait of a small nation in a state of collapse. . . gloriously readable. . .One of the nonfiction titles of the year, it is destined for literary accolades and popular success.” ―Observer

"Utterly engrossing . . . Ypi's memoir is brilliantly observed, politically nuanced and—best of all—funny." ―Guardian

"Ypi is a beautiful writer and a serious political thinker, and in just a couple hundred readable pages, she takes turns between being bitingly, if darkly, funny (she skewers Stalinism and the World Bank with equal deadpan) and truly profound...Free is meant to inspire." ―NY Times Book Review

“I was entranced from beginning to end." ―Sunday Times

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org

Enver Hoxha

Note: If this book is chosen for the group read, we’ll read it over 2 months since it is 414 pages.

Stalinism, that particularly brutal phase of communism, came to an end in most of Eastern Europe with the death of Josef Stalin in 1953 or at least with the Khrushchev reforms that began in the Soviet Union in 1956. However, in one country—Albania—Stalinism survived virtually unscathed until 1990. The regime that the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha led from the time of the communist takeover in 1944 until his death in 1985, and that continued unabated under his successor Ramiz Alia until 1990, was incomparably severe. Such was the reign of terror that no audible voice of opposition or dissent ever arose in the Balkan state, a European country that became as isolated from the rest of the world as North Korea is today. When the Albanian communist system finally imploded, it left behind a weary population, frightened and confused after decades of purges and political terror. It also left behind a country with a weak and fragile economy, a country where extreme poverty was the norm.

“Absolutely a fascinating read, being rather a journalistic approach to the subject than a classic biography.” —Passionnée des Livres

“The extraordinary story of how one man held an entire country hostage for 40 years—and got away with it. More importantly, it provides a voice to the dead, the disappeared, the exiled, and the purged, who are brought to life in a number of absorbing vignettes. Giving them a voice, something which Hoxha desperately tried to deny them, is perhaps Fevziu’s most profound achievement.” —Wild Tour Albania

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org

The Ghost Rider

Winner of the Man Booker Prize

An old woman is awoken in the dead of night by knocks at her front door. The woman opens it to find her daughter, Doruntine, standing there alone in the darkness. She has been brought home from a distant land by a mysterious rider she claims is her brother Konstandin. But unbeknownst to her, Konstandin has been dead for years. What follows is chain of events which plunges a medieval village into fear and mistrust. Who is the ghost rider?

“The novel itself, a relatively short one, is on one level a famous Albanian folk story which has been re-imagined as a medieval mystery. Beyond this, however, is a more complex tale which seeks to describe a sense of what it is to be Albanian…a story that shows how national identity was created and sustained in this small nation surrounded by many larger forces who sought to influence and control her throughout her history.” (Solar Bridge) A narrative that is based on the Albanian cultural precept that a besa, a sacred promise, must be fulfilled no matter what.

“Kadare’s fiction offers invaluable insights into life under tyranny—pointing both to the grand themes and small details that make up life in a restrictive environment. A great writer, by any nation’s standards.” —Financial Times

“One of Europe’s most consistently interesting and powerful contemporary novelists, a writer whose stark, memorable prose imprints itself on the reader’s consciousness.”
—Los Angeles Times

(A special thank you to book club member, Jordi Valbuena for the suggestion.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org

A Girl in Exile

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

During the bureaucratic machinery of Albania’s 1945–1991 dictatorship, playwright Rudian Stefa is called in for questioning by the Party Committee. A girl—Linda B.—has been found dead, with a signed copy of his latest book in her possession.

He soon learns that Linda’s family, considered suspect, was exiled to a small town far from the capital. Under the influence of a paranoid regime, Rudian finds himself swept along on a surreal quest to discover what really happened to Linda B.

“Erotic, paranoiac and lightly fantastical.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Comparisons to Kafka are inevitable, but there’s also some Joseph Heller here. Kadare successfully renders Big Brother . . . A poignant narrative about exile.” —Publishers Weekly

“Myth and dream, memory and repression, all converge as the novel illuminates the essence of art in totalitarian Albania. An author respected throughout Europe should reach a wider American readership with this subversive novel.” —Kirkus Reviews

(A special thank you to book club member, Anna Ruth for the suggestion.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org

Like a Prisoner

Winner of the English Pen Award

The book contains 11 dramatic and often horrifying stories, each describing the life of a different prisoner in the camps and prisons of communist Albania. The prisoners adapt, endure, and generally survive, all in different ways. They may conform, rebel, construct alternative realities of the imagination, cultivate hope, cling to memories of lost love, or devise increasingly strange and surreal strategies of resistance. The characters in different stories are linked to one another, and in their human relationships create a total picture of a secret and terrifying world. In the prisoners’ back stories, the anecdotes they tell, and their political discussions, the book also reaches out beyond the walls and barbed wire to give the reader a panoramic picture of life in totalitarian Albania.

Fatos Lubonja is Albania’s most distinguished opposition intellectual. He served 17 years in prison during communism, and since his release has been a fierce critic of the erosion of democracy.

“This is an incredible book because it is not a personal record of Fatos Lubonja's endurance in that grave, but of those of his other fellow prisoners whom he met in his odyssey through Albania's hellish prisons under the Enver Hoxha regime. Stories of survival, confrontation and horrendous, inhumane abuse.” —Anglo-Albanian Association

(A special thank you to book club member, Elke Richelsen for the suggestion.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org

Negative Space

Shortlist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize

“Language arrived fragmentary / split in syllables / spasmodic / like code in times of war,” writes Luljeta Lleshanaku in the title poem to her powerful new collection Negative Space. In these lines, personal biography disperses into the history of an entire generation that grew up under the oppressive dictatorship of the poet’s native Albania.

For Lleshanaku, the “unsaid, gestures” make up the negative space that “gives form to the woods / and to the mad woman— the silhouette of goddess Athena / wearing a pair of flip-flops / and an owl atop her shoulder.” It is the negative space “that sketched my onomatopoeic profile / of body and shadow in an accidental encounter.” Lleshanaku instills ordinary objects and places—gloves, used books, acupuncture needles, small-town train stations—with subtle humor and profound insight, much as a child might discover a world in a grain of sand.

“Lleshanaku’s work is so full of life and vivid detail that it rings with hope and a revivifying ambition.” —The Poetry Review

Lleshanaku’s poems are “full of objects and souls, transformed and given wings in Chagall-like metaphor.” —Poetry Nation Review

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org

Letters from Thailand

When the original Thai version of Letters from Thailand appeared in Bangkok in 1969, it was promptly awarded the SEATO Prize for Thai Literature. Thirteen years later, it was translated into English to reach a much wider readership. Today, the book is still considered one of Thailand’s most entertaining and enduring modern novels, and one of the few portrayals of the immigrant Chinese experience in urban Thailand.

Letters from Thailand is the story of Tan Suang U, a young man who leaves China to make his fortune in Thailand at the close of World War II, and ends up marrying, raising a family, and operating a successful business. The novel unfolds through his letters to his beloved mother in China.

In Tan Suang U’s lively account of his daily life in Bangkok’s bustling Chinatown, larger and deeper themes emerge: his determination to succeed at business in this strange new culture; his hopes for his family; his resentment at how easily his children embrace urban Thai culture at the expense of the Chinese heritage which he holds dear; his inability to understand or adopt Thai ways; and his growing alienation from a society that is changing too fast for him.

"The deft and at times hilarious comedy of these letters lies in the slow but relentless erosion of Tan Suang U's principles, under the balmy influence of a sunnier, lazier land." ―The NY Review of Books

"This is a fascinating book, and I heartily recommend it to all Westerners who know and love Thailand."―Bangkok Post Sunday Magazine

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org

The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth

Tuned to the rhythms of the soap operas that air on Thai television each night and written with the consuming intensity of a fever dream, this novel opens an insightful and truly compelling window into the Thai heart.

This is a melodrama about a ship-wrecked relationship.

Set in Thailand and traveling loosely over the 1980s and ‘90s, with mention of a political incident in 2010, this sad and beautiful book begins on the day Chareeya is born, the same day her mother discovers her father having an affair with a traditional Thai dancer. From that moment on, Chareeya’s life is bound to the weight of her parents’ disappointments.

She and her sister Chalika grow up in a lush, tranquil riverside town near the Thai capital of Bangkok, captivated by romance novels, classical music and games of make-believe. As children, the two develop a friendship with an orphaned boy, Pran. Over time these childhood friends find themselves lost between unrequited desires and fantastical dreams that are realer than their everyday lives. The culmination of the story comes as neither Chareeya, Chalika, nor Pran can exit safely from the intertwined labyrinth of their fates.

The author’s lyrical prose is enchanting: the book is filled with the colors, sounds and fragrances of Thailand. Her language has a hazy cinematic effect as characters maneuver through magical remembrances of events gone by, often failing to confront the problems in front of them.

Dangerous and irresistible, the story can be read either as a nod to old-fashioned Thai romances, or as a sophisticated, literary upgrade of the soap opera drama, or as a bitter commentary on the myths, smokescreens and delusions that seem to have disoriented the Thai people with many years’ heartbreak in attendance.

The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth won the 2015 S.E.A. Award, Southeast Asia’s most prestigious literary prize. It is now masterfully translated into English by Kong Rithdee, film critic and award-winning author in her own right.

(A special thank you to book club member, Jordi Valbuena for the suggestion.)

View on Amazon | Unavailable on Bookshop.org