In a crumbling house in the remote northeastern Himalayas, an embittered, elderly judge finds his peaceful retirement turned upside down by the arrival of his orphaned granddaughter, Sai. Kiran Desai's tragicomic novel The Inheritance of Loss spans two continents and three generations. The story cuts between New York and India, contrasting the menial jobs and meager conditions of immigrant life in the city with the political unrest engulfing an isolated...

The Nobel Laureate's psychologically penetrating story of the love affair between a rich South African and the illegal alien she "picks up" on a whim
Who picked up whom? Is the pickup the illegal immigrant desperate to evade deportation to his impoverished desert country? Or is the pickup the powerful businessman's daughter trying to escape a priveleged background she despises? When Julie Summers' car breaks down in a sleazy street, at

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At the close of the year 1918, forced to flee England's green and pleasant land, Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes enter British-occupied Palestine under the auspices of Holmes' enigmatic brother, Mycroft.
"Gentlemen, we are at your service." Thus Holmes greets the two travel-grimed Arab figures who receive them in the orange groves fringing the Holy Land. Whatever role could the volatile Ali and the taciturn Mahmoud play in Mycroft's design for...

Nega Mezlekia's memoir Notes from the Hyena's Belly was described in the New York Times Book Review as "the most riveting book about Ethiopia since Ryszard Kapuscinski's literary allegory The Emperor and the most distinguished African literary memoir since Soyinka's Aké appeared 20 years ago." Mezlekia now offers a first novel steeped in African folklore and teeming with the class, ethnic and religious struggles of pre-colonial Africa. In The God...

On April 16, 1942, a handful of Swiss Nazis in Payerne lure Arthur Bloch, a Jewish cattle merchant, into an empty stable and kill him with a crowbar. Europe is in flames, but this is Switzerland, and Payerne, a rural market town of butchers and bankers, is more worried about unemployment and local bankruptcies than the fate of nations across the border. Fernand Ischi, leader of the local Nazi cell, blames it all on the town's Jewish population and...

The Squatter and the Don (1885) is a novel by Mexican American author María Amparo Ruiz de Burton. The novel, Ruiz de Burton's second, explores the consequences of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo for the Californios whose land was taken following the Mexican American War. Central to its focus are the ways in which Californios were forced to provide proof of ownership while squatters, with the support of the US government, settled on their land. Following...

In a few months Romania will join the European Union. Meanwhile, the northern Italian town of Turin has been rocked by a series of deadly crimes involving Albanians and Romanians. Is this the latest eruption of a clan feud dating back centuries, or is the trouble being incited by local organized crime syndicates who routinely "infect" neighborhoods and then "cleanse" them in order to earn big on property developments? Enzo Laganà, born in Turin to...

Profiles ten Crypto-Jewish families coping with the trauma of living between worlds that are neither wholly Catholic nor wholly Jewish in late fourteenth century Spain.