Journal of an Ordinary Grief

The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

Kao Kalia Yang · 294 pages

In search of a place to call home, thousands of Hmong families made the journey from the war-torn jungles of Laos to the overcrowded refugee camps of Thailand and onward to America. But lacking a written language of their own, the Hmong experience has been primarily recorded by others. Driven to tell her family’s story after her grandmother’s death, The Latehomecomer is Kao Kalia Yang’s tribute to

In the Presence of Absence

Mahmoud Darwish, mHmwd drwysh · 200 pages

"Darwish composed this remarkable elegy at the apex of his creativity, but with the full knowledge that his death was imminent. Thinking it might be his final work, he summoned all his poetic genius to create a luminous work that defies categorization. In stunning language, Darwish's self-eelgy inhabits a rare space where opposites bleed and blend into each other. Prose and poetry, life and death,

Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood

Ibtisam Barakat · 200 pages

Time of White Horses

Ibrahim Nasrallah - ibrhym nSr llh · 643 pages

Set in Palestine, before the creation of the state of Israel, this lyrical and deftly written novel spans three generations living in the small village of Hadiya. Reaching back into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the immense history of this period is brought into focus by the very human stories of Hajj Mahmoud, his son Khaled, and grandson Naji. As the cruel hand of history hov

I Was Born There, I Was Born Here

Mourid Barghouti · 216 pages

In 2000 Mourid Barghouti published I Saw Ramallah, the acclaimed memoir that told of returning in 1996 to his Palestinian home for the first time since exile following the Six-Day War in 1967. I Was Born There, I Was Born Here takes up the story in 1998 when Barghouti returned to the Occupied Territories to introduce his Cairo-born son, Tamim, to his Palestinian family. Ironically, a few years lat

God Grew Tired of Us: A Memoir

John Bul Dau, Michael S. Sweeney · 295 pages

"Lost Boy" John Bul Dau's harrowing experience surviving the brutal horrors of Sudanese civil war and his adjustment to life in modern America is chronicled in this inspiring memoir and featured in an award-winning documentary film of the same name. Movingly written, the book traces Dau's journey through hunger, exhaustion, terror, and violence as he fled his homeland, dodging ambushes, massacres

Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

Marjane Satrapi · 187 pages

187 pages : illustrations ; 24 cmGN500L Lexile

Salt Houses

Hala Alyan · 320 pages

"From a dazzling new literary voice, a debut novel about a Palestinian family caught between present and past, between displacement and home ... On the eve of her daughter Alia's wedding, Salma reads the girl's future in a cup of coffee dregs. She sees an unsettled life for Alia and her children; she also sees travel, and luck. While she chooses to keep her predictions to herself that day, they wi

Music of the Ghosts

Vaddey Ratner · 446 pages

Leaving the safety of America, Teera returns to Cambodia for the first time since her harrowing escape as a child refugee. She carries a letter from a man who mysteriously signs himself as "the Old Musician" and claims to have known her father in the Khmer Rouge prison where he disappeared twenty-five years ago. Arriving in Phnom Penh, Teera finds a society still in turmoil, where perpetrators and

Midnight's Children

Salman Rushdie · 548 pages

Gate of the Sun

Elias Khoury · 539 pages

The Book of My Lives

Aleksandar Hemon · 214 pages

"Aleksandar Hemon's lives begin in Sarajevo, a small, blissful city where a young boy's life is consumed with street soccer with his casually multi-ethnic group of friends, resentment of his younger sister, and occasional trips abroad with his engineer-cum-beekeeper father, and a young man's life is about poking at the pretensions of the city's elders with American music, bad poetry, and slightly

Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust

Immaculee Ilibagiza · 215 pages

Immaculee Ilibagiza grew up in a country she loved, surrounded by a family she cherished. But in 1994 her idyllic world was ripped apart as Rwanda descended into a bloody genocide. Immaculee's family was brutally murdered during a killing spree that lasted three months and claimed the lives of nearly a million Rwandans. Incredibly, Immaculee survived the slaughter. For 91 days, she and seven other

The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss

Edmund de Waal · 368 pages

Traces the parallel stories of nineteenth-century art patron Charles Ephrussi and his unique collection of 360 miniature netsuke Japanese ivory carvings, documenting Ephrussi's relationship with Marcel Proust and the impact of the Holocaust on his cosmopolitan family.

I Saw Ramallah

Mourid Barghouti, mryd lbrGwthy · 195 pages

Barred from his homeland after 1967's Six-Day War, the poet Mourid Barghouti spent thirty years in exile, shuttling among the world's cities, yet secure in none of them; separated from his family for years at a time; never certain whether he was a visitor, a refugee, a citizen, or a guest. As he returns home for the first time since the Israeli occupation, Barghouti crosses a wooden bridge over th

The Boat

Nam Le · 272 pages

The seven stories in Nam Le's masterful collection The Boat take us across the globe, from the slums of Colombia to Iowa City; from the streets of Tehran to a foundering vessel in the South China Sea. They guide us to the heart of what it means to be human -- and herald the arrival of a remarkable new writer.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Braiding Sweetgrass

Robin Wall Kimmerer

A botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation espouses having an understanding and appreciation of plants and animals.

The Bite of Mango

Mariatu Kamara, Susan McClelland · 216 pages

The Ministry of Pain

Dubravka Ugresic · 264 pages

Having fled the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, Tanja Lucic is now a professor of literature at the University of Amsterdam, where she teaches a class filled with other young Yugoslav exiles, most of whom earn meager wages assembling leather and rubber S&M clothing at a sweatshop they call the "Ministry." Abandoning literature, Tanja encourages her students to indulge their "Yugonostalgia" in essay

A Thousand Splendid Suns

Khaled Hosseini · 416 pages

After 103 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and with four million copies of The Kite Runner shipped, Khaled Hosseini returns with a beautiful, riveting, and haunting novel that confirms his place as one of the most important literary writers today. Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates · 155 pages

An Amazon Best Book of July 2015: Readers of his work in The Atlantic and elsewhere know Ta-Nehisi Coates for his thoughtful and influential writing on race in America. Written as a series of letters to his teenaged son, his new memoir, Between the World and Me, walks us through the course of his life, from the tough neighborhoods of Baltimore in his youth, to Howard University—which Coates dubs “

Dreams in a Time of War

Ngugi wa Thiong'o · 256 pages

By the world-renowned novelist, playwright, critic, and author of Wizard of the Crow, an evocative and affecting memoir of childhood.Ngugi wa Thiong'o was born in 1938 in rural Kenya to a father whose four wives bore him more than a score of children. The man who would become one of Africa's leading writers was the fifth child of the third wife. Even as World War II affected the lives of Africans

Zoya's Story: An Afghan Woman's Struggle for Freedom

Zoya, John Follain, Rita Cristofari · 256 pages

The Sympathizer

Viet Thanh Nguyen · 384 pages

Follows a Viet Cong agent as he spies on a South Vietnamese army general and his compatriots as they start a new life in 1975 Los Angeles.