English books from Asia
Recommended English books (1231)
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".
311.
Funny in Farsi : A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America by Firoozeh Dumas EN
IranDescription:
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Finalist for the PEN/USA Award in Creative Nonfiction, the Thurber Prize for American Humor, and the Audie Award in Biography/Memoir This Random House Reader’s Circle edition includes a reading group guide and a conversation between Firoozeh Dumas and Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner! “Remarkable . . . told with wry humor shorn of sentimentality . . . In the end, what sticks with the reader is an exuberant immigrant embrace of America.”—San Francisco Chronicle In 1972, when she was seven, Firoozeh Dumas and her family moved from Iran to Southern California... continue
312.
Gaia, Queen of Ants by Hamid Ismailov EN
Country: Asia / 
Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan
Description:
From Uzbek author-in-exile Hamid Ismailov comes a dark new parable of power, corruption, fraud, and deception. Ismailov narrates an intimate clash of civilizations as he follows the lives of three expatriates living in England. Domrul is a young Turk with vague and painful memories of ethnic strife in the Uzbekistan of his childhood. His Irish girlfriend Emer struggles with her own adolescent trauma from growing up in war-torn Bosnia. Domrul is the caretaker for Gaia, the eighty-year-old, powerful wife of a Soviet party boss with a mysterious past. One of Ismailov’s few novels written in Uzbek... continue
313.
Games Without Rules by Tamim Ansary EN
Country: Asia / 
Afghanistan
Afghanistan
Description:
Today, most Westerners still see the war in Afghanistan as a contest between democracy and Islamist fanaticism. That war is real; but it sits atop an older struggle, between Kabul and the countryside, between order and chaos, between a modernist impulse to join the world and the pull of an older Afghanistan: a tribal universe of village republics permeated by Islam. Now, Tamim Ansary draws on his Afghan background, Muslim roots, and Western and Afghan sources to explain history from the inside out, and to illuminate the long, internal struggle that the outside world has never fully understood.... continue
314.
Gaze Back : Poems by Marylyn Tan EN
SingaporeDescription:
"What do we expect of an author who is unapologetically female? What do we expect of consuming art in general? Should a work be easy, should a work be safe? Marylyn Tan's debut volume, GAZE BACK, complicates ideas of femininity, queerness, and the occult. The feminine grotesque subverts the restrictions placed upon the feminine body to be attractive and its subjection to notions of the ideal. The occultic counterpoint to organised religion, then, becomes a way toward techniques of empowering the marginalised. GAZE BACK, ultimately, is an instruction book, a grimoire, a call to insurrection-to ... continue
315.
Geisha : A Life by Mineko Iwasaki EN
JapanDescription:
A Kyoto geisha describes her initiation into an okiya at the age of four, the intricate training that made up most of her education, her successful career, and the traditions surrounding the geisha culture.
316.
Ghost Music by An Yu EN
ChinaDescription:
From the author of the "original and electric" Braised Pork (Time), An Yu's enchanting and contemplative novel of music and mushrooms follows a former concert pianist searching for the truth about a vanished musician For three years, Song Yan has filled the emptiness of her Beijing apartment with the tentative notes of her young piano students. She gave up on her own career as a concert pianist many years ago, but her husband Bowen, an executive at a car company, has long rebuffed her pleas to have a child. He resists even when his mother arrives from the southwestern Chinese region of Yunnan ... continue
317.
Ghosts by Morio Kita EN
Description:
A pattern on a carpet; a red cocktail cherry; hide-and-seek in the dark; gravestones; a waterfall; a silver butterfly; a sister's death; a botched drawing; the sound of a flute.... Ghosts is a novel about the quest for a lost childhood, of which only fragments like these remain. Memory is focused like a magnifying glass on these clues to one man's past. Small, commonplace things are thus enhanced, and even simple events--relaxing in a bath, or flying a kite, or being unable to whistle--take on the same kind of aura that more dramatic ones have. In trying to remember, the narrator lea... continue
318.
Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok EN
Description:
Emigrating with her mother from Hong Kong to Brooklyn, Kimberly Chang begins a secret double life as an exceptional schoolgirl during the day and sweatshop worker at night, an existence also marked by a first crush and the pressure to save her family from poverty. A first novel.
319.
Girls of Riyadh by Rajaa Alsanea EN
Country: Asia / 
Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia
Description:
“Alsanea's wisdom and insight into the female experience seem surreal. She captures the core, universal truths of the complications in finding and holding a life partner. Her characters provide wisdom to each other that are astounding in their accuracy, and Alsanea thus speaks for countless women everywhere.” —Bookreporter.com When Rajaa Alsanea boldly chose to open up the hidden world of Saudi women—their private lives and their conflicts with the traditions of their culture—she caused a sensation across the Arab world. Now in English, Alsanea’s tale of the personal struggles of four young up... continue
320.
Glaring Through Oblivion by Serj Tankian EN
ArmeniaDescription:
From Serj Tankian—Grammy Award–winning lead singer of System Of A Down, songwriter, activist, and poet. Following his critically acclaimed debut poetry book, Cool Gardens, comes this new collection of stunning and original poems of darkness and light. Complemented by the transformative illustrations of the noted artist Roger Kupelian.