Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie

Saleem Sinai was born at midnight, the midnight of India's independence, and finds himself mysteriously 'handcuffed to history' by the coincidence. He is one of 1,001 children born at the midnight hour, each of them endowed with an extraordinary talent -- and whose privilege and curse it is to be
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The English Patient
by Michael Ondaatje

Haunting and harrowing, as beautiful as it is disturbing, The English Patient tells the story of the entanglement of four damaged lives in an Italian monastery as the second world war ends. The exhausted nurse, Hana; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burn victim who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal and rescue illuminate this book like flashes of sheet lightning. In lyrical prose informed by a poetic consciousness,
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The Inheritance of Loss
by Kiran Desai

Kiran Desai's first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, was published to unanimous acclaim in over twenty-two countries. Now Desai takes us to the northeastern Himalayas where a rising insurgency challenges the old way
of life. In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga lives an embittered
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The Land Of Green Plums
by Herta Muller

Set in Romania at the height of Ceauescu's reign of terror,

The Land of Green Plums tells the story of a group of young people who leave the impoverished province for the city in search of better prospects and camaraderie. But their hopes are ravaged, because the city, no less than the countryside, bears everywhere the mark of the dictatorship's corrosive touch. All the narrator's friends—teachers and students of vaguely dissident allegiance—betray her, do away with themselves, or both. As they do so, we see the way the totalitarian state comes to inhabit every human realm and how everyone, even the strongest, must either bend to the oppressors or resist them and thereby perish.

 
Herta Müller, herself a survivor of Ceausescu's police state, speaks from intimate experience. Scene by scene, in language at once harsh and poetic, she constructs a devastating picture of a society and a generation ruined by fear. In simple images of hieroglyphic power—policeman filling their pockets and mouths with green plums; girls sleeping with abattoir workers for bags of offal; a docile proletariat making things no one wants—"tin sheep and wooden watermelons"—Müller anatomizes a country and its citizens and the corruption that has rotted the core of both.
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The Blind Assassin
by Margaret Atwood

The Blind Assassin is a tale of two sisters, one of whom dies under ambiguous circumstances in the opening pages. The survivor, Iris Chase Griffen, initially seems a little cold-blooded about this death in the family. But as Margaret Atwood's most ambitious work unfolds--a tricky process, in fact, with several nested narratives and even an entire novel-within-a-novel--we're reminded of just how complicated the familial game of hide-and-seek can be.
 
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Life of Pi
by Yann Martel

Piscine Molitor Patel, otherwise known as Pi, lives in Pondicherry, where his father runs and owns the city's zoo. When he is sixteen, his parents decide to travel to Canada, taking their large family with them, but tragedy strikes when the cargo ship carrying them sinks during a terrible
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Oscar and Lucinda
by Peter Carey

Peter Carey's novel of the undeclared love between clergyman Oscar Hopkins and the heiress Lucinda Leplastrier is both a moving and beautiful love story and a historical tour de force. Made for each other, the two are gamblers - one obsessive, the other compulsive - incapable of winning at the game of love.
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Half of a Yellow Sun
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In 1960s Nigeria, a country blighted by civil war, three lives intersect. Ugwu, a boy from a poor village, works as a houseboy for a university lecturer. Olanna, a young woman, has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos to live with her charismatic new lover, the professor. The third is Richard, a shy Englishman in thrall to Olanna's enigmatic twin sister. When the shocking horror of the war engulfs them, their loyalties are severely tested as they are pulled apart and thrown together in ways that none of them imagined… 
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Interpreter Of Maladies
by Jhumpa Lahiri

Where Jhumpa scores is with her discovery of the apparently inconsequential that she allows to develop not into anything, but just develop. Her characters are mostly loners, strangers in foreign space, in generally cramped homes, trying to survive, never quite enjoying it. There are no relationships as such, the conversations
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My Friend The Fanatic
by Sadanand Dhume

In October 2002, Sadanand Dhume found himself in a place most foreigners were trying to flee – Bali. Powerful explosions the previous night had ripped through two tourist nightclubs, killing more than 200 people. That evening he visited what remained of the Sari Club and stood amongst piles of ash, and blackened beer bottles, wondering about the future of a country long regarded as immune to such carnage.  My Friend the Fanatic is a portrait of Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, painted through the travels of a pair of unlikely protagonists. Dhume is a foreign correspondent, a Princeton-educated Indian atheist with a fondness for John Updike and an interest in economic development. His companion, Herry Nourdi, is a young Islamist who hero-worships Osama bin Laden.  Does Herry represent the future of Indonesia? By turns disturbing and funny, My Friend the Fanatic fulfills a deep hunger for knowledge about a fascinating land in a time of profound change.
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