Cultural Heritage category: 3433 books

An intensely personal novel about childhood, memory, and history by one of today's most celebrated authors, now available in the US for the first time. Friend of My Youth begins with the novelist Amit Chaudhuri returning to Bombay, the city in which he grew up, to give a reading. Ramu, the...

The Bride of Amman, a huge and controversial bestseller when first published in Arabic, takes a sharp-eyed look at the intersecting lives of four women and one gay man in Jordan’s historic capital, Amman—a city deeply imbued with its nation’s traditions and taboos. When Rana finds herself not...

My Friend Annie takes the reader back into Janet Sandison's childhood. It opens as the death of her mother shatters the bliss of her Highland home. Janet migrates with her father to grimy, lowland Cairnton, where she meets the hateful and stupid Jean, soon, alas, to be her step-mother-and pretty Annie...

A historical detective story set against the social and political tumult of 1920s Barcelona and based on the real events of the end of a dazzling era. In the decade before the Spanish Civil War, Barcelona is on the verge of boiling over. Pablo Vilar, a well-connected young lawyer and journalist,...

An American opera singer travels to Naples and becomes embroiled in his strangest role yet Michael Ruane is an obscure American opera singer who arrives in Naples to play a small part in an important production of Tosca and star in his own staging of a little-known Benjamin Britten opera....

In the third volume of the Ancient Tahiti series, Tepua returns to her heart's home only to discover that a stranger has come, overthrowing traditions and deposing the high chief. All who would oppose him have been driven away or killed and war has found a home in Tahiti. Tepua, though, is carrying...

Troy Blacklaws’s acclaimed debut novel is the remarkable story of a boy coming of age in the wake of tragedy When his twin brother dies in a freak accident, Douglas’s life begins to unravel. His mother leaves his father, taking Douglas with her to live in the Karoo region, a harsh desert...

The idiosyncratic genius of Padgett Powell shines through in nine stories that bend the conventions of short fiction Padgett Powell’s literary stage is a blurred vision of the American South. His characters are bored, sad, assured, confused, deluded, and often just one step away from madness....

Twenty-three surreal fictions—stories, character assassinations, and mini-travelogues—from one of the most heralded writers of the American South There are many things that repulse “Dr. Ordinary.” “Kansas” is notable for its distinct lack of farmland. “Wayne’s Fate” is most...

In the second volume of the Ancient Tahiti series, years after she first landed on Tahiti, Tepua returns to her home island to care for her dying father—and discovers that home can change. She faces challenges both brutal and overwhelming as a band of foreigners ruins the mystical beauty of her...

A family of intellectuals comes apart at the seams during the 1968 student revolts in Paris The Parisian student revolts of May 1968 shook the country—and the European continent—to its foundations. In a tradition-obsessed nation where the old-guard bourgeoisie had spent decades oppressing...

Earning its author a third nomination for the Nobel Prize, this tale centers on a crane colony arriving at its breeding ground to play out a delicate drama, ending with the rarely observed ceremony of the ritual dance. All is observed by a transfixed child who has frozen into his background and...

From well-known and award-winning authors—including Bernardine Evaristo, Fred D’Aguiar, and Leone Ross—to previous unpublished writers, this ambitious and intriguing anthology of short stories showcases each author’s most challenging work. These works from writers who are happy to describe...

Published ahead of Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet and long before Midnight’s Children, Abdullah Hussein’s ambitious saga of social struggle The Weary Generations was a bestseller in Urdu. Published in 1963 and now beyond its 40th edition, it has never been out of print. A vivid depiction of the widespread...