Read Around Asia Challenge
Read at least one book by an author from each country in Asia.
Best books from Asia (1972)
1781.
ThailandDescription:
Un niño tailandés de diez años cuida sus vacas al atardecer. Es un niño lisiado, soñador, seguro de su gloria futura. A pesar de tener un brazo tullido, sueña con ser titiritero. Pero su futuro se viene abajo cuando lo ataca una cobra gigante. El niño reúne todas sus fuerzas, y con su único brazo válido mantiene a raya a la serpiente, que se enrosca a él y le comprime el cuerpo. Se pone a buscar ayuda, pero todos en el pueblo huyen espantados. ¿Cuánto podrá resistir?
El lector participa fascinado en el terrible suspense creado por esta búsqueda desesperada, que es también una sobrecogedora me... continue
1782.
Where Rivers Part : A Story of My Mother's Life by Kao Kalia Yang EN
Description:
"In the 1960s when Kalia's mother, Chue, was born, the US was actively recruiting Hmong Laotians to assist with CIA efforts in Laos's Secret War. By the time Chue was a teenager, the US had completely vacated Laos, and the country erupted into genocidal attacks on the Hmong people, who were perceived as traitorous for their involvement. Notably, from 1964-1973, Laos became victim to the heaviest bombardment by the United States against communist Pathet Lao, becoming the most heavily bombed country in history. Fearing vengeful soldiers looking to take their lives, Chue and her family quickly fl... continue
1783.
Description:
In a pink-walled motel, a teenage prostitute brings a grown man to tears. A lovestruck young boy holds the dismembered hand of his crush, only to find himself the object of a complex ménage à trois. A naked body falls from the window of a twenty-storey building, while two female office workers offer each other consolation in the elevator... In these wry and unsettling stories, Prabda Yoon once again illuminates something of the strangeness of modern cultural life in Bangkok. Disarming the reader with surprising charm, intensity and delicious horror, he explores what it means to have a body, an... continue
1784.
And Shall Machines Surrender by Benjanun Sriduangkaew EN
Description:
On the dyson sphere Shenzhen, artificial intelligences rule and humans live in luxury, vying to be chosen as host bodies--called haruspices--for the next generation of AI, and thus be worshiped as gods. Doctor Orfea Leung has come here to escape her past of mercenary violence. Krissana Khongtip has come here to reinvent herself from haunted spy to holy cyborg. But the utopian peace of Shenzhen is shattered when the haruspices begin committing suicide, and the pair are called upon to solve the mystery--and survive the silent war between machines . . .
1785.
Venom by Saneh Sangsuk EN
Description:
The village of Praeknamdang, nestled in the Thai jungle, has fallen under the spell of a corrupt religious leader. Only one family dares to resist his growing power: a couple and their talented ten-year-old son. But one day, while playing in the fields, the boy is attacked by a cobra. Locked in a life and death struggle with the snake, the border between the human and the animal disintegrates. Did the boy simply stray too near to a burrow, or is this a punishment for his family's independent spirit? A gripping existential parable, Venom introduces English language readers to the world of Saneh... continue
1786.
Jasmine Nights by S. P. Somtow EN
Description:
The setting is Thailand and the protagonists are two boys, one Thai, the other African-American. The novel traces their relationship, which is a meeting of East and West. By a Thai-born writer, author of Vampire Junction.
1787.
The Song Poet : A Memoir of My Father by Kao Kalia Yang EN
Description:
In the Hmong tradition, the song poet recounts the story of his people, their history and tragedies, joys and losses; extemporizing or drawing on folk tales, he keeps the past alive, invokes the spirits and the homeland, and records courtships, births, weddings, and wishes. Kao Kalia Yang retells the life of her father Bee Yang, the song poet, a Hmong refugee in Minnesota, driven from the mountains of Laos by America's Secret War. Bee lost his father as a young boy and keenly felt his orphanhood. He would wander from one neighbor to the next, collecting the things they said to each other, whis... continue
1788.
Cómo pronunciar cuchillo by Souvankham Thammavongsa ES
Description:
Si hay algo que caracteriza a los personajes de estos relatos es la firmeza y la convicción con las que se aferran a la vida. De una u otra manera, todos están atravesados por la inmigración y sus derivas más crueles, aunque también por momentos luminosas. Un boxeador fracasado termina esculpiendo uñas en el negocio de su hermana; una niña esconde las comunicaciones del colegio para no poner en evidencia que sus padres desconocen la cultura y el idioma del país al que acaban de mudarse; dos pequeños hermanos esperan con ansias que llegue esa única noche al año en la que recorren el barrio disf... continue
1789.
Memories of the Memories of the Black by NITIPRAPHA EN
Description:
A Sino-Chinese family find their destiny is inseparably entangled with that of the country they have adopted as a home. Not long before the Communist revolution, Tong, sent by his peasant-parents in impoverished rural China to work with a relative in Siam, has risen to become a rice-trading tycoon in Bangkok's Chinatown, married a former palace cook and built a large family in the town of Pad Riew. Haunted by the dream of returning to his true home in China, Tong, along with his wife and their five children, are swept along by the torrents of history as World War II breakout and China turns re... continue
1790.
Snow by Orhan Pamuk EN
TurkeyDescription:
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Touching, slyly comic, and humming with cerebral suspense—a masterful novel of "political intrigue and philosophy, romance and noir" (Vogue) and the lethal chemistry between secular doubt and Islamic fanaticism from the Nobel Prize winner. An exiled poet named Ka returns to Turkey and travels to the forlorn city of Kars. His ostensible purpose is to report on a wave of suicides among religious girls forbidden to wear their head-scarves. But Ka is also drawn by his memories of the radiant Ipek, now recently divorced. Amid blanketing snowfall and universal suspicion, Ka fin... continue