Read Your Way Around the World Book List

An utterly irresistible first novel: The story of two sisters, the yearning to disappear into another country, and the powerful desire to return to the known world. …More

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is an enchanting tale that captures the magic of reading and the wonder of romantic awakening. An immediate international bestseller, it tells the story of two hapless city boys exiled to a remote mountain village for re-education during China's infamous Cultural Revolution. …More

An Oprah's Book Club selection
Paton's deeply moving story of Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son Absalom, set against the backdrop of a land and people riven by racial inequality and injustice, remains the most famous and important novel in South Africa's history. …More

A stunning debut novel from the author of "My Own Country, Cutting for Stone" offers an enthralling family saga of Africa and America, fathers and sons, doctors and patients, exile and home. …More

In a heart-wrenching new novel, bestselling author Diamant ("The Red Tent") tells the story of four women, refugees from Nazi Europe, who find friendship, love, and salvation in a postwar British camp in Palestine. …More

In her richest, most deeply searching novel yet, Tyler pens a story about what it is to be an American, and about Iranian-born Maryam Yazdan, who, after 35 years in this country, must finally come to terms with her outsiderness. …More

In this enthralling international bestseller, two girls live inconspicuous lives in the center of an elegant Paris apartment building. It is only when a stranger moves into their building--and sees through the girls' disguises--that Paloma and Rene discover their kindred spirits. …More

"NEW YORK TIMES" BESTSELLER
In one of the most important and beloved Latin American works of the twentieth century, Isabel Allende weaves a luminous tapestry of three generations of the Trueba family, revealing both triumphs and tragedies. …More

This Pushcart Prize-winning story--a masterpiece of humor and heartbreak--unfolds a series of family snapshots that illuminate the landscape of an exiled community rich in heritage, memory, and longing for the past. At once "tender and sharp-fanged" ("L.A. Weekly"). …More

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The publishers of Cleave's new novel don't want to spoil the story by revealing too much about it. They will say that the beach scene is brutal, and that it braids the fates of a 16-year-old Nigerian orphan and a well-off British couple. …More

An Oprah's Book Club selection
a masterly evocation of an unrequited passion so strong that it binds three people's lives together for more than 50 years. …More

A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel tells with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha. …More

Born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of India's independence, Saleem grows up to learn the ominous consequences of this coincidence. His every act is mirrored and magnified in events that sway the course of national affairs, and telepathic powers link him with the other children born in that initial hour and endowed with magical gifts. …More

"In this deeply stirring novel, acclaimed author Cristina Garcia follows one extraordinary family through four generations, from China to Cuba to America. Wonderfully evocative of time and place, rendered in the lyrical prose that is Garcia's hallmark, Monkey Hunting" is an emotionally resonant tale of immigration, assimilation, and the prevailing integrity of self. …More

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Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies established this young writer as one the most brilliant of her generation. Her stories are one of the very few debut works -- and only a handful of collections -- to have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. …More

Volume I of the masterful "Cairo Trilogy. A national best-seller in both hardcover and paperback, it introduces the engrossing saga of a Muslim family in Cairo during Egypt's occupation by British forces in the early 1900s. …More

Kingsolver's national bestseller paints an intimate portrait of a crisis-ridden family amid the larger backdrop of an African nation in chaos. Examine how the tragedy of the Price family mirrors the political unrest in the Congo, how the novel views religion and marriage, and how Kingsolver reconciles the demands of art with her belief that writing should support a political cause. …More

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From the author of the bestsellers "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan" and "Peony in Love" comes a stunning novel about two sisters who leave Shanghai to find new lives in 1930s Los Angeles. …More

This is Chinua Achebe's classic novel, with more than two million copies sold since its first U.S. publication in 1969. Combining a richly African story with the author's keen awareness of the qualities common to all humanity, Achebe here shows that he is "gloriously gifted, with the magic of an ebullient, generous, great talent." -- Nadine Gordimer …More

"You don't want the book to end; it glows with compassion and you want more, more because you know this is a fine wine of a life, richer as it ages."--Frank McCourt, author of "Angela's Ashes"

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This absorbing account by a young man who, as a boy of 12, gets swept up in Sierra Leone's civil war, goes beyond even the best journalistic efforts in revealing the life and mind of a child abducted into the horrors of warfare. …More

From the award-winning author of "The Dew Breaker" comes her first work of nonfiction: a deeply affecting story of home and family, of two men's lives and deaths, and of a daughter's great love for them both. …More

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The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer brings to life the most intriguing woman in the history of the world: Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt. Though her life spanned fewer than 40 years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. …More

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"Day of Honey "is a beautifully written, fiercely intelligent memoir exploring the heightened meaning of cooking during wartime. …More

"Superb . . . Nothing less than a saga on the scale of the Exodus and an ordeal as heartbreaking as the Passion . . . The book comes vividly alive with a richness of language and a mastery of narrative detail that only the most gifted of writers are able to achieve."--"Los Angeles Times Book Review." …More

For fans of "Three Cups of Tea, The Dressmaker of Khair Khana," written by a former reporter for ABC News, tells the story of a fearless young entrepreneur who brought hope to the lives of dozens of women in war-torn Afghanistan. …More

Two Pulitzer Prize winners issue a call to arms against our era's most pervasive human rights violation: the oppression of women in the developing world. …More

Almost four decades after the original publication of this celebrated book, John Hersey went back to Hiroshima in search of the people whose stories he had told. His account of what he discovered about them is now the eloquent and moving final chapter of Hiroshima. …More

Rodriguez went to Afghanistan in 2002, just after the fall of the Taliban, volunteering as a nurse's aide, but soon found that her skills as a trained hairdresser were far more in demand. "Kabul Beauty School" is her witty and insightful memoir of friendship and perseverance. …More

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From beloved author Bryson comes a fascinating excursion into the history behind the place people call home. …More

One women's journey from a childhood in Australia's outback to adulthood as a successful American career woman. The Road From Coorain is about Everywoman, for it is about childhood loneliness, anguished parent-child relationships, dawning sensibility, discovering a vocation, and finding one's own sense of self. …More

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, this brilliantly reported and beautifully crafted book explores the clash between a medical center in California and a Laotian refugee family over their care of a child--and the lack of understanding that led to tragedy. …More

Chang recounts the evocative, unsettling, and insistently gripping story of how three generations of women in her family fared in the political maelstrom of China during the 20th century. …More

The World Is Flat is a timely and essential update on globalization, its successes and discontents, powerfully illuminated by one of our most respected journalists. …More

A multi-genre memoir exploring the author's Irish-Catholic, Sindhi Indian, and American identities. …More

A tour-de-force by rising indie comics star Yang, "American Born Chinese" tells the story of three apparently unrelated characters whose lives and stories come together with an unexpected twist in this action-packed modern fable. …More

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Winner of the prestigious Goscinny Prize for outstanding script. Set in Rwanda before and after the Tutsi genocide, and seen through the eyes of a young Hutu boy named Deogratias, Stassen probes man's inhumanity to man and reveals the grip of madness and horror on one young man and his country. …More

A "Time Magazine "Best Comix of the Year"
Wise, funny, and heartbreaking, "Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi's memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. …More

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Set during World War II in Germany, Zusak's groundbreaking novel is the story of Liesel Meminger, a foster girl living outside of Munich. Liesel, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing, encounters something she cant resist: books. …More

Beautifully written by reknowned author Julia Alvarez, "Finding Miracles" examines the emotional complexity of familial relationships and the miracles of everyday life. …More

An aviator whose plane is forced down in the Sahara Desert encounters a little prince from a small planet who relates his adventures in seeking the secret of what is important in life. Color and b&w illustrations. …More

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From a Newbery Medalist comes a mesmerizing novel based on a true story. "A Long Walk to Water" begins as two stories, told in alternating sections, about a girl in Sudan in 2008 and a boy in Sudan in 1985. …More

"No Safe Place" is a novel of high adventure and heart-stopping suspense by a writer at the height of her powers. …More

Life is both sweet and cruel to strong-willed young Shabanu, whose home is the windswept Cholistan Desert of Pakistan. The second daughter in a family with no sons, she's been allowed freedoms forbidden to most Muslim girls. But when a tragic encounter with a wealthy and powerful landowner ruins the marriage plans of her older sister, Shabanu is called upon to sacrifice everything she's dreamed of. …More

Tree-ear is an orphan boy in a 12th-century Korean potters' village. For a long time he is content living with Crane-man under a bridge barely surviving on scraps of food. All that changes when he sees master potter Min making his beautiful pottery. …More

Fourteen-year-olds Raphael and Gardo team up with a younger boy, Rat, to figure out the mysteries surrounding a bag Raphael finds during their daily life of sorting through trash in a third-world country's dump. …More

An American sailor courts a Japanese girl and each tries, in secret, to learn the other's way of eating. …More

Through compelling reminiscences of his grandfather's life in America and Japan, Caldecott Medalist Allen Say gives us a poignant account of his family's unique cross-cultural experience. Illustrated with memorable full-color paintings, this is Say's most personal and remarkable picture yet of the bridging of the two cultures. Full color. 1994 Caldecott Medal. …More

Winner - 2002 Pura Belpré Award - Narrative
When tragedy shatters her privileged life in Mexico, Esperanza and Mama flee to California and settle in a farm labor camp. There, Esperanza must confront the challenges of hard labor and find acceptance among her people. …More

In this Newbery Honor book, a fantasy with elements of "The Wizard of Oz" and Chinese folklore, a young girl named Minli embarks on an epic journey to find the mythical Old Man of the Moon. Full color. …More

Aminah is an orphan living on the streets of Al Kal'as. Desperate, she appeals to Princess Badr for work. The princess responds by throwing her husband, Aladdin's, seemingly worthless lamp at her. But to Aminah's surprise, the lamp is magic. …More