And three apples fell from heaven: One for the storyteller, One for the listener, And one for the eavesdropper Narine Abgaryan’s novel Three Apples Fell From the Sky begins with this age-old Armenian proverb, each line of which becomes the title for the three sections of this reflective book about life in a remote…
A raven-haired young woman in a red dress is the deity which presides over this slim collection of eight short stories set in modern-day Macau.
Jena Lin was a child prodigy; now, in her early twenties, she uses sex to fill the void left by fame. Jena is still a musician, her professional life taking her from practice to rehearsal and back again. But once a solo violinist who traveled the world, she now finds herself auditioning for a position…
Well, what can one say? The guy can write. Joshua Kam’s How the Man in Green Saved Pahang, and Possibly the World is quite the debut, accomplished, deft, unabashed and exuberant.
The histories of Japan and the United States have been intertwined for a hundred and fifty years. In her new collection of similarly interrelated short stories, Asako Serizawa both mines events from this history as well as reaches into the future.
Loosely inspired by Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Sonali Dev’s new book is enriched with culinary allusions, replete with the aromas of tea and spice and based in a modern South Asian family (of royal lineage), as was her prior Austen revamp.
When Excel Maxino turns ten, his mother, Maxima, takes him to Pier 39 in San Francisco, revealing a life-changing secret: She and Excel are TNT: tago ng tago, Tagalog for hiding and hiding. In his new novel, The Son of Good Fortune, Lysley Tenorio tells a captivating story of undocumented immigrants and their never-ending resolve…
For my generation, born after the “Renovation” reform of Đổi Mới in 1986, “The War”—as most Vietnamese call what almost everyone else calls the Vietnam War—only exists in history books.
“The challenges faced by the Vietnamese people throughout history are as tall as the tallest mountains,” writes Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai in the first chapter of The Mountains Sing. This is no exaggeration: wars, famine and political revolution test her characters, various members of the extended Tran family, to the limit. This engrossing family saga,…
Diksha Basu’s Destination Wedding is a delightful comedy of manners, about relationships among an extended clan of Indian-American wedding-goers. Cast as a sort of Crazy Rich South Asians, the destination is Delhi. The wedding is that of Shefali and Pavan, a thoroughly-modern couple of rich kids with wacky families, whose wedding, unbeknownst to them, is…
Jeong You-jeong’s Seven Years of Darkness opens in 2011 with young Choi Sowon living in Lighthouse Village, South Korea. The place is so remote GPS can’t locate it and so out of date that the president of its youth-club is sixty-one years old.
The title of this book is the first “imposture”, flouting the venerable approach of calling this 12th-century Arabic classic the “Assemblies” or the “Seances of Hariri”. Maqamat means a halting place, where an audience might sit around and tell stories. It can, at a stretch, mean “to get up”, focusing on the storyteller standing before…
The opening section of Shubhangi Swarup’s debut novel is set in India’s tropical Andaman Islands. Forestry Minister, Girija Prasad, marries clairvoyant Chanda Devi: he works with trees, she converses with them.
Waheeda Rela finds her life in politics (in a fictional district in Indian state of Uttar Pradesh in the late 1990s) decided by a chit drawn from a bowl. Fundraising and campaigning have her run into Monish, a rich industrialist playboy. What begins to happen between the two makes a dangerous story.
Tourism has been an industry hit harder than almost any other by Covid-19. Restarting it is one of the major post-pandemic priorities, although mass tourism has itself often been an environmental and, especially in developing countries, social scourge. Although written well before the outbreak, Yun Ko-Eun’s entertaining eco-satire The Disaster Tourist is only just now…