Read Around Asia Challenge
Read at least one book by an author from each country in Asia.
Best books from Asia (1982)
1311.
Rice Without Rain by Minfong Ho EN
MyanmarDescription:
After social rebels convince the headman of a small village in northern Thailand to resist the land rent, his seventeen-year-old daughter Jinda finds herself caught up in the student uprising in Bangkok.
Nepal1313.
Palpasa Café by Narayan Wagle EN
Description:
A journalist sits in a café waiting for his subject—an artist called Drishya about whom he wants to write a novel. But Drishya doesn’t come. For that morning he has been visited by Maoists at his home and abducted by them... So begins Palpasa Café, the extraordinary novel by Nepali journalist Narayan Wagle, which has become a sensation in the country. Starting with the murders of the royal family, it tells the troubled story of contemporary Nepal through the eyes of a romantic artist who falls in love, wanders the war-struck countryside and dreams of creating a café named after his beloved whi... continue
1314.
We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies by Tsering Yangzom Lama EN
Description:
"In the wake of China's invasion of Tibet throughout the 1950s, Lhamo and her younger sister, Tenkyi, arrive at a refugee camp in Nepal. They survived the dangerous journey across the Himalayas, but their parents did not. As Lhamo--haunted by the loss of her homeland and her mother, a village oracle--tries to rebuild a life amid a shattered community, hope arrives in the form of a young man named Samphel and his uncle, who brings with him the ancient statue of the Nameless Saint--a relic known to vanish and reappear in times of need. Decades later, the sisters are separated, and Tenkyi is livi... continue
1315.
Seasons of Flight by Manjushree Thapa EN
Description:
It was and it was not far, where she came from. Some days her birth village felt centuries away, and other days it was too close, she could not get far enough away from it- She lived, now, in America, in a spare, uncluttered flat with a transient feel. Her only memento from home was an ammonite, a lustrous stone the colour of shale, the shape of a lopsided egg. A fossil of marine life from when the himals were below the sea, millennia ago.' Prema, a young woman adrift in war-torn rural Nepal, with little to bind her to her family, village and country, wins a green card in a US government ... continue
1316.
Description:
“A rare and fascinating testimony . . . of a little girl who made an incredible trip from inner Dolpo to America—and from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century.” —Eric Valli, director of the Oscar nominated film, Himalaya The absorbing memoir of a spirited girl in a remote, undeveloped region of Nepal near the border of Tibet, a place made known to the world in Peter Matthiesen’s The Snow Leopard. Life above 13,000 feet in northern Dolpo was one of constant risk and harsh survival. In the 1980s, Dolpo had no running water, electricity, motor vehicles, phones, school, or doctors, other th... continue
1317.
The Guru of Love by Samrat Upadhyay EN
Description:
"Ramchandra is a math teacher earning a low wage and living in a small apartment in Kathmandu with his wife and two children. Moonlighting as a tutor, he engages in an illicit affair with one of his tutees, Malati, a beautiful, impoverished young woman who is also a new mother."--Jacket.
1318.
MAD COUNTRY by Samrat Upadhyay EN
Description:
If you see Orwell and Kafka together walking down a street, you are in the world of Samrat Upadhyay's Mad Country. The editor of an investigative magazine contends with the trauma of a disappeared colleague, a political tragedy that vies for her attention with a more domestic crisis: a friend who's suicidal over a divorce. An American hippie in Kathmandu in the 1980s undergoes a drastic identity change, only to discover that the metamorphosis brings its own heartbreak. A young man forms a bond with an African woman who has inexplicably appeared on the streets of the city. A wealthy Nepali boy-... continue
1319.
Slavenkind by Urmila Chaudhary NL
Description:
Waargebeurd verhaal van een Nepalese jonge vrouw die op haar zesde door haar ouders werd verkocht als huisslavin aan een rijke familie.
1320.
Tilled Earth: Stories by Manjushree Thapa EN
Description:
Startlingly Original And Closely Observed Stories That Capture The Dynamism And Diversity Of Nepali Society In A Time Of Great Flux In Tilled Earth Several Compressed, Poetic And Deeply Evocative Micro-Stories Offer Fleeting Glimpses Of Small, Private Dramas Of People Caught Midlife: An Elderly Woodworker Loses His Way In A Modern Kathmandu Neighbourhood; A Homesick Expatriate Nurses A Hangover; A Clerk At The Ministry Of Home Affairs Learns To Play Solitaire On The Computer; A Young Man Is Drawn To Politics Against His Better Judgement; A Child Steals Her Classmate S Book . . . The Longer Sto... continue