HISTORICAL FICTION - INDIA Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India's Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning--and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala's long-existing Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl--and future matriarch, known as Big Ammachi--will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.
A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the difficulties undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. It is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.
(15 copies)
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DOMESTIC FICTION - RICH PEOPLE The outrageously funny debut novel about three super-rich, pedigreed Chinese families and the gossip, backbiting, and scheming that occurs when the heir to one of the most massive fortunes in Asia brings home his ABC (American-born Chinese) girlfriend to the wedding of the season.
(12 copies)
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AUTOBIOGRAPHY - MUSCICIAN An unflinching, powerful memoir about the author’s life, growing up Korean-American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity.
She tells of growing up the only Asian-American kid at her school in Oregon, of struggling with her mother's high expectations of her and of a painful adolescence but with treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul where she and her mother would bond over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the east coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, performing gigs with her fledgling band and meeting the man who would become her husband her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.
(5 copies)
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HISTORICAL FICTION - AFRICA Twin brothers are orphaned at childbirth in Addis Ababa. When they fall in love with the same woman, one brother goes to work in an underfunded New York hospital. Here his past catches up with him.
(15 copies)
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