General Books

The Kite Runner Illustrated Edition

Khaled Hosseini

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2520 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A deluxe collector's edition of the phenomenally bestselling The Kite Runner, filled with striking and memorable photographs that bring Khaled Hosseini's compelling story to life.

Since its publication in 2003, The Kite Runner has shipped over four million copies and spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list. Taking us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy through the horrific rule of the Taliban, The Kite Runner is the heartbreaking story of the unlikely and inseparable friendship between a wealthy Afghan boy and the son of his father's servant, both of whom are caught in the tragic sweep of history. Published in the aftermath of America's invasion of Afghanistan, Khaled Hosseini's haunting writing brought a part of the world to vivid life that was previously unknown.

Now this beautifully produced, collectible hardcover enhances Khaled Hosseini's story with unforgettable color and black-and-white photographs of the people of Afghanistan and their surroundings, further illustrating the world in which the story is set and heightening the already powerful experience of reading this incredible book.

A Thousand Splendid Suns

Khaled Hosseini

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Total reviews: 1310 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

After 103 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and with four million copies of The Kite Runner shipped, Khaled Hosseini returns with a beautiful, riveting, and haunting novel that confirms his place as one of the most important literary writers today.

Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an incredible chronicle of thirty years of Afghan history and a deeply moving story of family, friendship, faith, and the salvation to be found in love.

Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them-in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul-they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival.

A stunning accomplishment, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a haunting, heartbreaking, compelling story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship, and an indestructible love.

Unaccustomed Earth

Jhumpa Lahiri

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 122 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

From the internationally best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author, a superbly crafted new work of fiction: eight stories—longer and more emotionally complex than any she has yet written—that take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand as they enter the lives of sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, friends and lovers.

In the stunning title story, Ruma, a young mother in a new city, is visited by her father, who carefully tends the earth of her garden, where he and his grandson form a special bond. But he’s harboring a secret from his daughter, a love affair he’s keeping all to himself. In “A Choice of Accommodations,” a husband’s attempt to turn an old friend’s wedding into a romantic getaway weekend with his wife takes a dark, revealing turn as the party lasts deep into the night. In “Only Goodness,” a sister eager to give her younger brother the perfect childhood she never had is overwhelmed by guilt, anguish, and anger when his alcoholism threatens her family. And in “Hema and Kaushik,” a trio of linked stories—a luminous, intensely compelling elegy of life, death, love, and fate—we follow the lives of a girl and boy who, one winter, share a house in Massachusetts. They travel from innocence to experience on separate, sometimes painful paths, until destiny brings them together again years later in Rome.

Unaccustomed Earth is rich with Jhumpa Lahiri’s signature gifts: exquisite prose, emotional wisdom, and subtle renderings of the most intricate workings of the heart and mind. It is a masterful, dazzling work of a writer at the peak of her powers.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan: A Novel

Lisa See

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 605 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Phenomenal Women Book Club (Houston, TX) 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan was a wonderful, loving, and tragic story of friendship and betrayal that teaches the reader much about compassion and forgiveness. We felt that Snow Flower and the Secret Fan was a book that truly transcended time and culture. This plot, with two women at its center, encompasses the hurt, pain, anguish, and undying compassion two women felt for each other. The author's ability to paint `true and clear' pictures of her characters allows you to see into their soul; thus developing a deeper understanding of both the men and women portrayed in the book.

This is a memorable piece that allows you to experience feelings that you have faced either through your own life or the life of a loved one. After reading it, many of us were forced to rethink the experiences we've had in the 20th century and how they are reminiscent of the events shown in the book: dishonesty, betrayal, a desire to survive, illness. All of these ultimately ending up with a common denominator of devotion and forgiveness.

Many of us cried as we completed the book because we came to the realization that this would not be a happily ever after tale. "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan" was a great story with twists and turns you might not anticipate. Through this book many can better understand how far women have come since the days of foot binding; it also shows us how far we have not come from sharing a sisterhood of secrets, compassion, betrayal, and unconditional love as sisters. This was an excellent story and we highly recommend it.

Editorial Review:

In nineteenth-century China, in a remote Hunan county, a girl named Lily, at the tender age of seven, is paired with a laotong, “old same,” in an emotional match that will last a lifetime. The laotong, Snow Flower, introduces herself by sending Lily a silk fan on which she’s painted a poem in nu shu, a unique language that Chinese women created in order to communicate in secret, away from the influence of men. As the years pass, Lily and Snow Flower send messages on fans, compose stories on handkerchiefs, reaching out of isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments. Together, they endure the agony of foot-binding, and reflect upon their arranged marriages, shared loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. But when a misunderstanding arises, their deep friendship suddenly threatens to tear apart.

The Space Between Us: A Novel (P.S.)

Thrity Umrigar

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 100 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Imitation of Life 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Set in modern-day India and told through two women, the movel shows how the lives of the rich and the poor are intrinsically connnected yet vastly removed from each other, and captures how the bonds of womamhood are pitted against the divisions of class and culture. Reminded me of the Lana Turner movie Imitation of Life. An interesting book that makes you thik about how fortunate we in America really are.

Editorial Review:

Poignant, evocative, and unforgettable, The Space Between Us is an intimate portrait of a distant yet familiar world. Set in modern-day India, it is the story of two compelling and achingly real women: Sera Dubash, an upper-middle-class Parsi housewife whose opulent surroundings hide the shame and disappointment of her abusive marriage, and Bhima, a stoic illiterate hardened by a life of despair and loss, who has worked in the Dubash household for more than twenty years. A powerful and perceptive literary masterwork, author Thrity Umrigar's extraordinary novel demonstrates how the lives of the rich and poor are intrinsically connected yet vastly removed from each other, and how the strong bonds of womanhood are eternally opposed by the divisions of class and culture.

The Namesake

Jhumpa Lahiri

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Total reviews: 477 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies established this young writer as one the most brilliant of her generation. In The Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations.
The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged marriage, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name.
Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along a first-generation path strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves.

The Inheritance of Loss

Kiran Desai

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Total reviews: 157 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Yuk 1 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Like "reading" a slow train wreck - achingly dull and painful at the same time. There is no effort to make the reader care about any of the characters - do you really want to feel only alternating disdain and pity all the way through any book? Surely that could not have been the writer's intention?

Editorial Review:

Published to extraordinary acclaim, The Inheritance of Loss heralds Kiran Desai as one of our most insightful novelists. She illuminates the pain of exile and the ambiguities of postcolonialism with a tapestry of colorful characters: an embittered old judge; Sai, his sixteen-year-old orphaned granddaughter; a chatty cook; and the cook’s son, Biju, who is hopscotching from one miserable New York restaurant to another, trying to stay a step ahead of the INS. When a Nepalese insurgency in the mountains threatens Sai’s new-sprung romance with her handsome tutor, their lives descend into chaos. The cook witnesses India’s hierarchy being overturned and discarded. The judge revisits his past and his role in Sai and Biju’s intertwining lives. A story of depth and emotion, hilarity and imagination, The Inheritance of Loss tells a story of love, family, and loss.

Fieldwork

Mischa Berlinski

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 41 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Fieldwork - An Anthropological Memoir 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This tale started so quietly, but Mischa Berlinski's meticulous research and intricately woven stories within stories; produced an impressive cast of characters --- and spirits that made this novel a compelling read. Berlinski's "fieldwork" is fictional and yet is so believable. At the heart of all this, is the struggle of an indigeneous tribe in the hinterlands of Thailand; to keep its way of life --- and their unlikely champion to preserve this way of life.

Anthropological and mission work among a hill tribe in Thailand 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

The American journalist Mischa Berlinski is the narrator in this novel, so at times one feels it might be an autobiography, especially as in an autobiography you might find the rambling structure you find in this book; and a number of footnotes contribute to that impression. But in a note at the end the author tells us that `none of this stuff happened to anyone'.

The thread that holds the book together is the fictional Berlinski's obsessive attempt to unravel the mystery of Martiya van der Leun, an American-educated anthropologist whom he had heard about but never met, who had been working with the animist Dyalo hill tribe in Northern Thailand, had been in prison for murder and had apparently committed suicide there.

(If you google Dyalo, the references are all to this novel. Its name is invented, but the author's note suggests that the inspiration for it might be a tribe called the Lisu. The other neighbouring tribes mentioned in the book all really exist.)

The fictional Berlinski goes to meet as many people as possible who knew Martiya; and he then gives you such long and detailed histories of their lives that we quite forget about Martiya: at one stage there is no mention of her for some ninety pages.

The person she was accused of having murdered was one David Walker. We learn more and more about Martiya's life - and very interesting it is - without getting any clues, until very near the end, to the mystery of why she killed David. In fact the first meeting between Martiya and David comes just seventeen pages before the conclusion of the book.

David belonged to an extended American family, several of whom were or had been Christian missionaries. Mischa seeks them out, and we get the life story of David's missionary parents, whom Mischa meets, and of his missionary grandparents. Though one wonders why were are told all this (only one incident in the parents' life, briefly alluded to, will have a bearing on Martiya's story), it is still very well and atmospherically done. The author Belinski writes very well, brings people very much to life and gets the reader interested in them. These missionaries may be a little odd in their total faith, their belief in evil spirits, their prayerfulness and their expectation of an imminent Rapture; but, unlike those in, say, Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible, they are presented affectionately and without mockery or condescension.

Author Belinski, we are told, has worked as a journalist in Thailand, so he is clearly knowledgeable about that country and beautifully evokes its sights and its atmosphere. Though he curiously spells the author of the Golden Bough as Frazier, he is also knowledgeable about anthropology, its theory as studied in academic institutions and its often far from glamorous field work practice - but every now and again an anthropologist goes `native'. One wonders, of course, whether he has invented the dyal, the rice planting rites of the Dyalo people; perhaps he has based them imaginatively on the customs of some other tribes described by Sir James Frazer: at any rate he has made them sound very convincing. They play a crucial role in the story, but, characteristically, we learn about them only on page 237, three-quarters of the way through.

Despite its structural oddities, this is a book full of life. I have enjoyed it very much and was fully involved with it.

Editorial Review:

Vivid, passionate, funny, deeply researched, and page-turningly plotted, this novel--set in northern Thailand--is a daring, spellbinding tale of anthropologists, missionaries, demon possession, sexual taboos, murder, and an obsessed young reporter named Mischa Berlinski. Unabridged. 11 CDs.

The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan

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Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

magnificent 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Amy Tan is a magnificent writer, telling us stories that translate across cultures, nationalities and even ages. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book.

Very Good 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

In the book "The Joy Luck Club" written by Amy Tan, there are tons of Chinese cultured explored and different peoples relationships that you get to read through. Amy Tan takes you on a journey through 8 different peoples lives and the stories they told. Each story is a little different from one another.
"The Joy Luck Club" is a very challenging read. Amy Tans writing style is very difficult to follow. Each chapter is a different story. If you pay really close attention to each story and kind of take notes they all come together in the end. It is a really good read but challenging. If you have a hard time following book this may not be a good read for you or you can just take notes to follow along.
Throughout the book you get to learn a little bit about the Chinese culture. For example in one of the chapters a character is getting married and it is an arranged marriage, the girl does not want to marry this man. Unfortunately the mother of the groom had told the bride that if the candle that is lit on both sides that represents if there marriage will last, if one of the sides blow out throughout the day of the marriage they will not last together. That is a myth that is told in Chinese culture. While I was reading this book I was sort of comparing and contrasting between American culture and Chinese culture and how much they are different. In this book Chinese mothers and American mothers all want the same thing in their daughters. They all want them to grow up and be successful. In China it is a honor to take after your mother as you grow up. I feel the bad thing in Chinese culture is they have arranged marriages, I don't agree with them. I feel that everyone should get to choose the one they love and want to spend the rest of their life with and not have someone in their family pick for you. If you end up not loving them and you are stuck with them for the rest of your life, you will not live a happy life that you would have if you got to choose the one you loved and wanted to marry.
Challenging but very good is a good way to describe this book. I recommend this book to people who don't mind having a challenge. It is an excellent read.

Reviewer: Brittany Modreski

Editorial Review:

A stunning literary achievement, The Joy Luck Club explores the tender and tenacious bond between four daughters and their mothers. The daughters know one side of their mothers, but they don't know about their earlier never-spoken of lives in China. The mothers want love and obedience from their daughters, but they don't know the gifts that the daughters keep to themselves. Heartwarming and bittersweet, this is a novel for mother, daughters, and those that love them.

The Bonesetter's Daughter: A Novel (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

Amy Tan

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Total reviews: 308 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

““As compelling as Tan’s first bestseller, The Joy Luck Club. . . No one writes about mothers and daughters with more empathy than Amy Tan.”
–The Philadelphia Inquirer

“[An] absorbing tale of the mother-daughter bond . . . this book sing[s] with emotion and insight.”
–People


Ruth Young and her widowed mother, LuLing, have always had a tumultuous relationship. Now, before she succumbs to forgetfulness, LuLing gives Ruth some of her writings, which reveal a side of LuLing that Ruth has never known. . . .

In a remote mountain village where ghosts and tradition rule, LuLing grows up in the care of her mute Precious Auntie as the family endures a curse laid upon a relative known as the bonesetter. When headstrong LuLing rejects the marriage proposal of the coffinmaker, a shocking series of events are set in motion–all of which lead back to Ruth and LuLing in modern San Francisco. The truth that Ruth learns from her mother’s past will forever change her perception of family, love, and forgiveness.


“A strong novel, filled with idiosyncratic, sympathetic characters; haunting images; historical complexity; significant contemporary themes; and suspenseful mystery.”
–Los Angeles Times

“For Tan, the true keeper of memory is language, and so the novel is layered with stories that have been written down–by mothers for their daughters, passing along secrets that cannot be said out loud but must not be forgotten.”
–The New York Times Book Review

“Tan at her best . . . rich and hauntingly forlorn . . . The writing is so exacting and unique in its detail.”
–San Francisco Chronicle