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A Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseini
Penguin Hardcover 384pp $25.95
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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.
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The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857
William Dalrymple
Knopf Hardcover 560pp $30.00
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Award-winning historian and travel writer William Dalrymple shapes his powerful retelling of this fateful course of events from groundbreaking material: previously unexamined Urdu and Persian manuscripts thatinclude Indian eyewitness accounts and records of the Delhi courts, police and administration during the siege. The Last Mughal is a revelatory work-the first to present the Indian perspective on the fall of Delhi-and has as its heart both the dazzling capital personified by Zafar and the stories of the individuals tragically caught up in one of the bloodiest upheavals in history.
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My Life In France
Julia Child
Knopf Hardcover 336pp $25.95
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In her own words, here is the captivating story of Julia Child's years in France, where she fell in love with French food and found 'her true calling.' From the moment the ship docked in Le Havre in the fall of 1948 and Julia watched the well-muscled stevedores unloading the cargo to the first perfectly soigné meal that she and her husband, Paul, savored in Rouen en route to Paris, where he was to work for the USIS, Julia had an awakening that changed her life. Soon this tall, outspoken gal from Pasadena, California, who didn't speak a word of French and knew nothing about the country, was steeped in the language, chatting with purveyors in the local markets, and enrolled in the Cordon Bleu.
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Once upon a Country: A Palestinian Life
Sari Nusseibeh
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Hardcover 560pp $27.50
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A prominent Palestinian's searching, anguished, deeply affecting autobiography, in which his life story comes to be the story of the recent history of his country. Sari Nusseibeh’s autobiography is a remarkable book—one in which his dramatic life story and that of his embattled country converge in a work of great passion, depth, and emotional power. Nusseibeh was raised to represent his country. His family’s roots in Palestine traced back to the Middle Ages, and his father was the governor of Jerusalem. Educated at Oxford, he was trained to build upon his father’s support for coexistence and a negotiated solution to the problems of the region.
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1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East
Tom Segev
Henry Holt Hardcover 688pp $35.00
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From Israel’s leading historian, a sweeping history of 1967—the war, what led up to it, what came after, and how it changed everything Tom Segev’s acclaimed works One Palestine, Complete and The Seventh Million overturned accepted views of the history of Israel. Now, in 1967—a number-one bestseller in Hebrew—he brings his masterful skills to the watershed year when six days of war reshaped the country and the entire region.
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Landscape of Hope and Despair: Palestinian Refugee Camps
Julie Peteet
University of Pennsylvania Press Hardcover 260pp $55.00
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Landscape of Hope and Despair traces the dialectic of place and cultural identification through the initial despair of the 1950s and early 1960s to the tumultuous days of the resistance and the violence of the Lebanese civil war and its aftermath. Most significantly, this study articulates space, place, and identity to construct an alternative to the received national narratives of Palestinian society and history." The stories told here form a larger picture of these refugees as a people struggling to recreate their sense of place and identity and add meaning to their surroundings through the uses of culture and memory.
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Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood
Ibtisam Barakat
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Hardcover 192pp $16.00
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In this groundbreaking memoir set in Ramallah during the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War, Ibtisam Barakat captures what it is like to be a child whose world is shattered by war. Transcending the particulars of politics, this illuminating and timely book provides a telling glimpse into a little-known culture that has become an increasingly important part of the puzzle of world peace.
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Macedonia
Jimmy Carter
Simon & Schuster Softcover 288pp $15.00
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In this book President Carter shares his intimate knowledge of the history of the Middle East and his personal experiences with the principal actors, and he addresses sensitive political issues many American officials avoid. Pulling no punches, Carter prescribes steps that must be taken for the two states to share the Holy Land without a system of apartheid or the constant fear of terrorism.
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Macedonia
Harvey Pekar
Random House Softcover 160pp $17.95
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In this unforgettable story, Roberson traveled to far-off Macedonia to find out how a country that had edged dangerously close to the brink of violence had somehow managed to avoid all-out war at a time when many believe violence is an unavoidable consequence of the modern world.
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I'jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody
Sinan Antoon
City Lights Softcover 168pp $11.95
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An inventory of the General Security headquarters in central Baghdad reveals an obscure manuscript. Written by a young man in detention, the prose moves from prison life, to adolescent memories, to frightening hallucinations, and what emerges is a portrait of life in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
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Road from Ar Ramadi
Camilo Mejia
New Press Hardcover 288pp $24.95
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Staff Sgt. Mejia became the new face of the antiwar movement in early 2004 when he applied for a discharge from the Army as a conscientious objector. After serving in the Army for nearly nine years, he was the first known Iraq veteran to refuse to fight. He was eventually convicted of desertion by a military court and sentenced to a year in prison.
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American Visa
Juan De Recacoechea
Akashic Books Softcover 257pp $14.95
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Armed with fake papers, a handful of gold nuggets, and a snazzy custom-made suit, an unemployed schoolteacher with a singular passion for detective fiction sets out from small-town Bolivia on a desperate quest for an American visa, his best hope for escaping his painful past and reuniting with his grown son in Miami.
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Witness: One of the Great Correspondents of the Twentieth Century Tells Her Story
Ruth Gruber
Knopf Hardcover 288pp $27.50
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With her perfect memory (and plenty of zip), ninety-five-year-old Ruth Gruber–adventurer, international correspondent, photographer, maker of (and witness to) history, responsible for rescuing hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees during World War II and after–tells her story in her own words and photographs.
In Witness, Gruber writes about what she saw and shows us, through her haunting and life-affirming photographs–taken on each of her assignments–the worlds, the people, the landscapes, the courage, the hope, the life she witnessed up close and firsthand
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The Dry White Season
Andre Brink
Harper Collins Softcover 316pp $13.95
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Ben Du Toit is a white schoolteacher in suburban Johannesburg in a dark time of intolerance and state-sanctioned apartheid. A simple, apolitical man, he believes in the essential fairness of the South African government and its policies—until the sudden arrest and subsequent "suicide" of a black janitor from Du Toit's school. Haunted by new questions and desperate to believe that the man's death was a tragic accident, Du Toit undertakes an investigation into the terrible affair—a quest for the truth that will have devastating consequences for the teacher and his family, as it draws him into a lethal morass of lies, corruption, and murder.
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Before I Forget
Andre Brink
Sourcebooks Hardcover 384pp $26.00
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Chris Minaar is a writer, a distinguished South African writer, an old writer and a writer who has lost his gift for the word. That is, until, he meets Rachel, a woman destined to become the great love of his life, a love greater for being unfulfilled.
Before I Forget is the final act of Chris's creative life; it is the coming together of all the chaotic pieces of his existence. It is much more than the story of how he met Rachel; it is the story of his life and his lifetime of loves. There are brief affairs, extended affairs, even a marriage and in all of them we find Chris retelling his joys and pains in such a way that they move us to tears and beyond.
Erotic, searingly honest, elegiac and one of the most profoundly moving novels of Andre Brink's illustrious career, this is the history of a life set against the history of a nation and, more than anything, a tribute to lost lovers and our very ability to love at all.
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Abyssinian Chronicles
Moses Isegawa
Knopf Softcover 480pp $15.00
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Like an African Midnight's Children or One Hundred Years of Solitude, this epic generational saga set in Uganda tells a story of the twentieth century that is seminal in its scope and vision. Moses Isegawa's unforgettable tale is centered around the coming-of-age of Mugezi, a charming and quick-witted young man who manages to make it through the hellish reign of Idi Amin and experiences firsthand the most crushing aspects of Ugandan society. He withstands his distant father's oppression, his mother's cruelty in the name of Catholic zeal, and the ravages of war, poverty, and AIDS. Through it all he is miraculously able to keep a hopeful and even occasionally bemused outlook on life. In the end his hard-won observations form a cri de coeur for a people shaped by the untold losses of the postcolonial African experience. Mugezi's odyssey, from a small rural community to the city of Kampala and, ultimately, across the borders of Uganda, is a riveting work from a powerful, passionate, and humorous new literary voice.
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Snakepit
Moses Isegawa
Knopf Softcover 272pp $14.00
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Bat Katanga is a Ugandan just returned to his homeland after two years in Britain. While he completed a postgraduate degree at Cambridge, he watched from afar as "flag independence [gave] way to economic independence" in Uganda, his chances to make a fortune there increasing with each "reform" imposed by Idi Amin. Now, when Bat lands a job as Bureaucrat Two in the Ministry of Power and Communications, he feels himself entering the top echelons of government, his sense of honor and honesty firmly intact: "Everything seemed to have been building to this moment, his triumphant entry into the bastions of power." But when he is threatened into taking a bribe from a Saudi prince, he unwittingly begins a journey - both psychological and physical - into the darkest and most dangerous precincts of the madness that was Amin's Uganda.
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The Savage Detectives
Roberto Bolaño
Farrar, Straus Hardcover 592pp $27.00
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New Year's Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run. The explosive first long work by "the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time" (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances.
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Amulet
Roberto Bolaño
New Directions Hardcover 192pp $21.95
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Amulet is a monologue, like Bolaño's acclaimed debut in English, By Night in Chile. The speaker is Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan woman who moved to Mexico in the 1960s, becoming the "Mother of Mexican Poetry," hanging out with the young poets in the cafés and bars of the University. She's tall, thin, and blonde, and her favorite young poet in the 1970s is none other than Arturo Belano (Bolaño's fictional stand-in throughout his books). As well as her young poets, Auxilio recalls three remarkable women: the melancholic young philosopher Elena, the exiled Catalan painter Remedios Varo, and Lilian Serpas, a poet who once slept with Che Guevara. And in the course of her imaginary visit to the house of Remedios Varo, Auxilio sees an uncanny landscape, a kind of chasm. This chasm reappears in a vision at the end of the book: an army of children is marching toward it, singing as they go. The children are the idealistic young Latin Americans who came to maturity in the '70s, and the last words of the novel are: "And that song is our amulet."
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Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857
William Dalrymple
Knopf Hardcover 560pp $30.00
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On a hazy November afternoon in Rangoon, 1862, a shrouded corpse was escorted by a small group of British soldiers to an anonymous grave in a prison enclosure. As the British Commissioner in charge insisted, "No vestige will remain to distinguish where the last of the Great Moghuls rests. Bahadur Shah Zafar II, the last Mughal Emperor, was a mystic, an accomplished poet and a skilled calligrapher. But while his Mughal ancestors had controlled most of India, the aged Zafar was king in name only. Deprived of real political power by the East India Company, he nevertheless succeeded in creating a court of great brilliance, and presided over one of the great cultural renaissances of Indian history.
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In the Country of Men
Hisham Matar
Random House Hardcover 246pp $22.00
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On a white-hot day in Tripoli, Libya, in the summer of 1979, nine-year-old Suleiman is shopping in the market square with his mother. His father is away on business - but Suleiman is sure he has just seen him, standing across the street in a pair of dark glasses. But why isn't he waving? And why doesn't he come over when he knows Suleiman's mother is falling apart?" Whispers and fears intensify around Suleiman: his best friend's father disappears and is next seen being interrogated on state television; a man parks his car outside the house every day and asks strange questions; and his mother frantically burns his father's books. As Suleiman begins to wonder whether his father has disappeared for good, it feels as if the walls of his home will break with the secrets that are being held within.
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We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan by the Japanese
Elizabeth M. Norman
Simon & Schuster Softcover 352pp $14.95
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In the fall of 1941, the Philippines was a gardenia-scented paradise for the American Army and Navy nurses stationed there. War was a distant rumor, life a routine of easy shifts and evenings of dinner and dancing under the stars. On December 8 all that changed, as Japanese bombs rained on American bases in Luzon, and the women's paradise became a fiery hell. Caught in the raging battle, the nurses set up field hospitals in the jungles of Bataan and the tunnels of Corregidor, where they saw the most devastating injuries of war, and suffered the terrors of shells and shrapnel.
But the worst was yet to come. As Bataan and Corregidor fell, a few nurses escaped, but most were herded into internment camps enduring three years of fear and starvation. Once liberated, they returned to an America that at first celebrated them, but later refused to honor their leaders with the medals they clearly deserved. Here, in letters, diaries, and firsthand accounts, is the story of what really happened during those dark days, woven together in a compelling saga of women in war.
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The Story of French
Jean-Benoît Nadeau
St. Martin's Press Hardcover 448pp $25.95
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Why does everything sound better if it's said in French? That fascination is at the heart of The Story of French, the first history of one of the most beautiful languages in the world that was, at one time, the pre-eminent language of literature, science and diplomacy. Nadeau and Barlow chart the history of a language spoken as a native tongue by 130 million people around the globe. The first document written in the French was signed by the sons of Charlemagne in 832. After this, Latin was purged from the courts of France by Francois 1st, giving root to French speakers' 21st century obsession with language protection. The obsession progressed as Cardinal Richelieu established the French Academy, a group entrusted with the responsibility of keeping the language pure and eloquent. As French circled the globe, the international cast of characters included Montaigne, Catherine the Great, Frederic II of Prussia, the guides of the Lewis and Clark expedition, Jules Verne, and others. Let Nadeau and Barlow guide you through the story of a language used to write some of the world's great masterpieces of literature, construct some of the most important documents of diplomacy, bedevil millions with its vagaries of pronunciation and beguile everyone with its beauty.
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Blood and Volume: Inside New York's Israeli Mafia
Dave Copeland
Barricade Books Hardcover 288pp $24.95
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Blood and Volume: Inside New York's Israeli Mafia by Dave Copeland reads like fiction but is absolutely all true. Ron Gonen ran a multi-million dollar drug distribution and contract murder syndicate in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan in the 1980's. With associates Ron Efrainm and Johnny Attias, the money was coming in fast. Closest in comparison is Henry Hill's story, which was made into a movie, Goodfellas. Gonen was manipulative and charismatic, traveling between Tel Aviv and New York, doing deals until it all unraveled. He saw the helicopter over his house and knew it was over. After his arrest he exchanged information for the witness protection program. Lest the reader think he is enjoying the ill-gotten-gains of his crimes, the morality tale here is that he is living somewhere unrevealed with his family, eking out a modest income and even borrowing a few dollars from his mother to get by.
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The Long Road Home: A Story of War and Family
Martha Raddatz
Penguin Hardcover 310pp $24.95
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In April 2004, soldiers from the 1st Cavalry Division were on a routine patrol in Sadr City, Iraq, when they came under surprise attack. Over the course of the next forty-eight hours, 8 Americans would be killed and more than 70 wounded. Back home, as news of the attack began filtering in, the families of these same men, neighbors in Fort Hood, Texas, feared the worst. In time, some of the women in their circle would receive "the call"-the notification that a husband or brother had been killed in action. So the families banded together in anticipation of the heartbreak that was certain to come.
The firefight in Sadr City marked the beginning of the Iraqi insurgency, and Martha Raddatz has written perhaps the most riveting account of hand-to-hand combat to emerge from the war in Iraq. This intimate portrait of the close-knit community of families Stateside-the unsung heroes of the military -distinguishes The Long Road Home from other stories of modern warfare, showing the horror, terror, bravery, and fortitude not just of the soldiers who were wounded and killed but also of the wives and children whose lives now are forever changed.
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Aya
Marguerite Abouet
Drawn & Quarterly Hardcover 105pp $19.95
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Ivory Coast, 1978. Family and friends gather at Aya's house every evening to watch the country's first television ad campaign promoting the fortifying effects of Solibra, "the strong man's beer." It's a golden time, and the nation, too--an oasis of affluence and stability in West Africa--seems fueled by something wondrous.
Aya tells the story of its nineteen-year-old heroine, the studious and clear-sighted Aya, her easygoing friends Adjoua and Bintou, and their meddling relatives and neighbors. It's a breezy and wryly funny account of the desire for joy and freedom, and of the simple pleasures and private troubles of everyday life in Yop City. An unpretentious and gently humorous story of an Africa we rarely see-spirited, hopeful, and resilient--Aya won the 2006 award for Best First Album at the Angoulême International Comics Festival. Clément Oubrerie's warm colors and energetic, playful lines connect expressively with Marguerite Abouet's vibrant writing.
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How I Became A Nun
Cesar Aira
New Directions Softcover 128pp $13.95
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"My story, the story of 'how I became a nun,' began very early in my life; I had just turned six. The beginning is marked by a vivid memory, which I can reconstruct down to the last detail. Before, there is nothing, and after, everything is an extension of the same vivid memory, continuous and unbroken, including the intervals of sleep, up to the point where I took the veil...." So starts César Aira's astounding "autobiographical" novel. Intense and perfect, this invented narrative of childhood experience bristles with dramatic humor at each stage of growing up: a first ice cream, school, reading, games, friendship. The novel begins in Aira's hometown, Coronel Pringles. As self-awareness grows, the story rushes forward in a torrent of anecdotes which transform a world of uneventful happiness into something else: the anecdote becomes adventure, and adventure, fable, and then legend. Between memory and oblivion, reality and fiction, César Aira's How I Became a Nun retains childhood's main treasures: the reality of fable and the delirium of invention.
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A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
Ishmael Beah
Simon & Schuster Hardcover 229pp $22.00
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What is war like through the eyes of a child soldier? How does one become a killer? How does one stop? Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have struggled to imagine their lives. But until now, there has not been a first-person account from someone who came through this hell and survived.
In A Long Way Gone, Beah, now twenty-five years old, tells a riveting story: how at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he'd been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.
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365 Ways To Change the World: How to Make a Difference One Day at a Time
Michael Norton
Simon & Schuster Softcover 390 pp $14.00
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You want to make a difference in the world, but don't know where to begin. Now you can. Here is just the guide to lots of exciting ways that are more personal and fun than merely writing a check. For every day of the year, 365 Ways to Change the World is packed with information and ideas that don't take a lot of special skills to put into action, but will achieve something positive.
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Farewell Waltz
Milan Kundera
Harper Collins Softcover 278 pp $12.95
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Perhaps the most brilliantly plotted and sheerly entertaining of Milan Kundera's novels, Farewell Waltz poses the most serious questions with a blasphemous lightness that makes us see that the modern world has deprived us even of the right to tragedy. This beautiful new translation, made from the French text prepared by the novelist himself, fully reflects his own tone and intentions. As such it offers an opportunity for both the discovery and the rediscovery of one of the very best of a great writer's work.
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Moomin Book One: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip
Tove Jansson
Drawn & Quarterly Hardcover 95 pp $19.95
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Tove Jansson is revered around the world as one of the foremost children's authors of the twentieth century for her illustrated chapter books regarding the magical worlds of her creation, the Moomins. The Moomins saw life in many forms but debuted to its biggest audience ever on the pages of the world's largest newspaper, the London Evening News, in 1954. The strip was syndicated in newspapers around the world with millions of readers in forty countries. Moomin Book One is the first volume of Drawn & Quarterly's publishing plan to reprint the entire strip drawn by Jansson before she handed over the reins to her brother Lars in 1960. This is the first time the strip will be published in any form in North America and will deservedly place Jansson among the international cartooning greats of the last century.
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The Paradox of American Power
Joseph S. Nye
Oxford University Press Softcover 222 pp $15.95
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Nye, former assistant secretary of defense under Clinton and current dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, offers a prescription for America's new role in the world that calls for a broader, more responsible, and cooperative relationship with the rest of the world.
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Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov
Penguin Softcover 448 pp $12.95
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Written during the darkest, most repressive period of Stalin's reign, this novel gives substance to the notion of artistic and religious freedom. Despite its devastating satire of Soviet life and its audacious portrayals of Christ and Satan, the manuscript had somehow eluded Russian censors, and the enthusiasm of its readers assured the novel immediate and enduring success. "The New York Times Book Review" calls this "one of the truly great Russian novels of this century".
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The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini
Penguin Softcover 384 pp $14.00
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Privileged young narrator Amir comes of age during the last peaceful days of the monarchy in Afghanistan, then must endure revolution, invasion and a country's long struggle to triumph over violent forces.
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Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy
The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey
The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts
The Anatomy of Revolution
Zapata and the Mexican Revolution