Popular Asian Historical Fiction Books
Find historical fiction books written by authors from Asia for the next part of the Read Around The World Challenge. (335)
41.
Country: Asia / 
Bangladesh
Bangladesh
Description:
A love story unravels in the tumultuous years leading up to the war for Bangladeshi Independence, revealing the irreconcilable fissures of land and life.
A city is hellbent on revolution. Passionate and impetuous, Shelley Majumder is a university student at a time of political discord in Dhaka in the late 1960s. Frustrated by the oppression of West Pakistani rulers, the Bengali people are rising up, taking Shelley with them. As he is forced to navigate the chaos of an uprising, where his every choice and action weighs heavy with consequence, Shelley's life is thrown further into disarray... continue
Lebanon43.
Bibliolepsy by Gina Apostol EN
Country: Asia / 
Philippines
Philippines
Description:
Moving, sexy, and archly funny, Gina Apostol’s Philippine National Book Award-winning Bibliolepsy is a love letter to the written word and a brilliantly unorthodox look at the rebellion that brought down a dictatorship Gina Apostol’s debut novel, available for the first time in the US, tells of a young woman caught between a lifelong desire to escape into books and a real-world revolution. It is the mid-eighties, two decades into the kleptocratic, brutal rule of Ferdinand Marcos. The Philippine economy is in deep recession, and civil unrest is growing by the day. But Primi Peregrino has her ow... continue
44.
Birth Canal by Dias Novita Wuri EN
IndonesiaDescription:
This dazzling novella from a rising star of Indonesian literature explores generational legacies, lost loves, the damage that war does to men, and the damage that men do to women. In today’s Jakarta, an unnamed man tells the story of his lifelong friend Nastiti, and what happened on the day she vanished. In the Dutch East Indies’ Semarang, a young Indo-Dutch girl, Rukmini, is captured by the Japanese military and is forced into prostitution. Years later, Arini travels to the Netherlands to share her mother’s dark past with a researcher. After the American occupation of Japan in WWII ends, a fo... continue
45.
Black Ice by Mahmudul Haque EN
Country: Asia / Bangladesh
Bangladesh
Description:
Abdul Khaleq teaches at a rural college nearing collapse in newly independent Bangladesh. When a writer friend asks him to chronicle his childhood, Abdul retreats to an enchanting world in the suburbs of Calcutta. He remembers the girl who spoke to fish and birds, the girl he first loved. He also recalls the stream of visitors who came to his parents' door in those days, some bearing want, some malice, and others, generosity and wisdom. He plummets into despondency when memories return him to a time when Hindu-Muslim tensions in undivided Bengal eclipsed his innocence. Abdul's nostalgia enrage... continue
46.
Country: Asia / Philippines
Philippines
Description:
Samuel lives in a tribe deep in the Philippine jungle at the end of the nineteenth century, and has never encountered anyone from outside his own tribe before. Hes about to become a man, and while hes desperate to grow up, hes worried that this will take him away from his best friend, Little Luki.
47.
Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan EN
Sri LankaDescription:
New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • A courageous young Sri Lankan woman tries to protect her dream of becoming a doctor in this “heartbreaking exploration of a family fractured by civil war” (Brit Bennett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Half). “This book, a careful, vivid exploration of what’s lost within a community when life and thought collapse toward binary conflict, rang softly for me as a novel for our own country in this odd time.”—Nathan Heller, The New Yorker AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • WINNER OF THE CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTION, THE WOMEN’S PRIZE... continue
48.
ChinaDescription:
A bestseller in China, Brothers is an epic and wildly unhinged black comedy of modern Chinese society running amok. Here is China as we've never seen it before, in a sweeping, Rabelaisian panorama of forty years of rough-and-rumble Chinese history, from the madness of the Cultural Revolution to the equally rabid madness of extreme materialism. Yu Hua, award-winning author of To Live, gives us a surreal tale of two comically mismatched stepbrothers, Baldy Li, a sex-obsessed ne'er-do-well, and the bookish, sensitive Song Gang, who vow that they will always be brothers—a bond they will struggle t... continue
49.
Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie EN
PakistanDescription:
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award An Orange Prize Finalist Nagasaki, August 9, 1945. Hiroko Tanaka watches her lover from the veranda as he leaves. Sunlight streams across Urakami Valley, and then the world goes white. In the devastating aftermath of the atomic bomb, Hiroko leaves Japan in search of new beginnings. From Delhi, amid India's cry for independence from British colonial rule, to New York City in the immediate wake of 9/11, to the novel's astonishing climax in Afghanistan, a violent history casts its shadow the entire world over. Sweeping in its scope and mesmerizing in its ev... continue
50.
But for the Lovers by Wilfrido D. Nolledo EN
Country: Asia / Philippines
Philippines
Description:
In the 25 years since its original publication, But for the Lovers has acquired an underground reputation as one of the most remarkable novels about World War II, doing for the Pacific war theater what Joseph Heller's Catch-22 did for the European one. Set in the Philippines, But for the Lovers depicts the survival of a cross-section of Filipinos during the Japanese Occupation and the American Liberation. The cast is enormous, including an old man who used to wander the countryside entertaining children, a young girl raped by Japanese soldiers, guerrilla messengers bringing word of the co... continue