English books from Asia
Recommended English books (819)
Travel the world without leaving your chair.
If you speak English here are some English books from Asia for the next part of the "Read Around The World Challenge".
21.
ChinaDescription:
From one of China's most celebrated contemporary novelists comes this riveting tale of a young woman's emotional and sexual awakening. Set in the turbulent decades of the Cultural Revolution and the Tian'anmen Square incident, A Private Life exposes the complex and fantastical inner life of a young woman growing up during a time of intense social and political upheaval. At the age of twenty-six, Ni Niuniu has come to accept pain and loss. She has suffered the death of her mother and a close friend and neighbor, Mrs. Ho. She has long been estranged from her tyrannical father, while her boyfrien... continue
22.
A River in Darkness : One Man's Escape from North Korea by Masaji Ishikawa EN
JapanDescription:
Previously published in Japan in 2000. Translated from Japanese by Risa Kobayashi and Martin Brown. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2017.
23.
A Sky So Close to Us : A novel by Shahla Ujayli EN
SyriaDescription:
A multigenerational tale of love, loss, exile, and rebirth, shortlisted for the 2016 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. As children sleeping on the rooftop of their ancestral family home in Raqqa on warm summer nights, Joumane and her sisters imagine the sky is so close they can almost touch it. Years later, Joumane lives as an expatriate in Jordan, working for a humanitarian agency, while her sisters remain trapped in war-torn Syria. Living alone as she fights her own battle with cancer, she contemplates the closeness of the same sky, despite the sharply delineated borders that now separ... continue
24.
A Spy in the House by Ying S. Lee EN
SingaporeDescription:
Rescued from the gallows in 1850s London, young orphan and thief Mary Quinn is offered a place at Miss Scrimshaw's Academy for Girls where she is trained to be part of an all-female investigative unit called The Agency and, at age seventeen, she infiltrates a rich merchant's home in hopes of tracing his missing cargo ships.
South Korea26.
A Stone Is Most Precious Where It Belongs : A Memoir of Uyghur Exile, Hope, and Survival by Gulchehra Hoja EN
Description:
In the vein of Nadia Murad's The Last Girl and Yeonmi Park's In Order to Live, an extraordinary memoir of life among the Uyghurs, a people and culture being systematically destroyed by China, and a woman who gave up everything to help her people In February 2018, twenty-four members of Gulchehra Hoja's family disappeared overnight. In one evening, all those she had left behind in Ürümchi when she fled to a new life in the United States were arrested because of her. Her crime - and thus that of her family - was her award-winning investigations for Radio Free Asia on the plight of the Uyghur peo... continue
27.
A strangeness in my mind by Orhan Pamuk EN
TurkeyDescription:
At a family wedding Mevlut catches sight of a girl with whom he falls in love. After a secret courtship of letters passed via his cousin, she agrees to elope with him, and on a dark night the two come together for the first time. As they rush to catch a train to Istanbul, Mevlut realises he has been misled. But the die is cast, and the situation will determine the rest of his days. Over the next four decades in Istanbul, Mevlut works various jobs to support his loving wife and family; work that gives him a special perspective on his rapidly changing city and the people who live there. And ever... continue
28.
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth EN
IndiaDescription:
Vikram Seth's novel is, at its core, a love story: Lata and her mother, Mrs. Rupa Mehra, are both trying to find -- through love or through exacting maternal appraisal -- a suitable boy for Lata to marry. Set in the early 1950s, in an India newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis, A Suitable Boy takes us into the richly imagined world of four large extended families and spins a compulsively readable tale of their lives and loves. A sweeping panoramic portrait of a complex, multiethnic society in flux, A Suitable Boy remains the story of ordinary people caught up in a web of l... continue
29.
A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz EN
IsraelDescription:
Discover Amos Oz’s most iconic work in this extraordinary memoir that is at once a great family saga and a magical self-portrait of a writer who witnessed the birth of a nation *OVER 2 MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE* ‘A hero of mine, a moral as well as literary giant’ Simon Schama Amos Oz's remarkable, moving story takes us on a seductive journey through his childhood and adolescence, along Jerusalem's war-torn streets in the 1940s and '50s and into a small apartment crowded with books in twelve languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. Caught between them is one small boy with the weigh... continue
30.
A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear by Atiq Rahimi EN
Country: Asia / 
Afghanistan
Afghanistan
Description:
Farhad is a typical student, interested in wine, women & poetry. But one night changes all that. It is 1979 & Afghanistan is in the early days of the pro-Soviet coup. Farhad goes out drinking with a friend who is about to flee to Pakistan. A few hours later he regains consciousness in a strange house, beaten & confused.