Literary / Asian literature

Please Look After Mom

Man Asian Literary Prize 2011

by Kyung-Sook Shin

A million-plus-copy best seller in Korea—a magnificent English-language debut poised to become an international sensation—this is the stunning, deeply moving story of a family’s search for their mother,...

Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out

by Mo Yan & Howard Goldblatt

Ximen Nao, a landowner known for his generosity and kindness to his peasants, is not only stripped of his land and worldly possessions in Mao's Land Reform Movement of 1948, but is cruelly executed, despite...

Mad dogs & Co

by Chart Korbjitti

Thai hippiedom in its 1980s heyday. 

First serialised in a women's magazine, 

yet another masterpiece by the author of

1982 SEA Write Award winning The Judgment

and 1994 SEA Write Award winning Time.

In Times of Siege: A Novel

by Githa Hariharan

At 52, Shiv Murthy is a New Delhi professor of history. He leads a mild, unremarkable life until, while his wife is away, things spin out of control. First, the young and passionate daughter of an old friend...

One Man's Bible

by Gao Xingjian

One Man's Bible is a fictionalized account of Gao Xingjian's life under the Chinese Communist regime. Daily life is riddled with paranoia and fear, and government propaganda turns citizens against one another....

A Thousand Cranes

by Yasunari Kawabata

With a restraint that barely conceals the ferocity of his characters' passions, one of Japan's great postwar novelists tells the luminous story of Kikuji and the tea party he attends with Mrs. Ota, the rival...

Paprika: A Novel

by Yasutaka Tsutsui

Widely acknowledged as Yasutaka Tsutsui's masterpiece, Paprika unites his surreal, quirky imagination with a mind-bending narrative about a psychiatric institute that has developed the technology to invade people's...

Chaos Theory

by Anuvab Pal

Sunita and Mukesh are friends. He's cynical, from Calcutta, cocky and well-read. She's clever, curious and amused by him. It's the 1960s, Delhi University. Fashionable movies play at the art deco cinemas, Nehruvian...

Snakes and Ladders

by Gita Mehta

India is a land of contrasts. It is the world's most populous democracy, but it still upholds the caste system. It is a burgeoning economic superpower, but one of the poorest nations on earth. It is the home...

Moth Smoke

by Mohsin Hamid

Available for the first time from Riverhead-the debut novel from the bestselling author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

Moth Smoke, Mohsin Hamid's deftly conceived first novel, immediately marked him as an...

After the Quake: Stories

by Haruki Murakami

The six stories in Haruki Murakami’s mesmerizing collection are set at the time of the catastrophic 1995 Kobe earthquake, when Japan became brutally aware of the fragility of its daily existence. But the upheavals...

The Legend of Pradeep Mathew

by Shehan Karunatilaka

Winner of the Commonwealth Book Prize * Winner of the $50,000 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature ** A Publishers Weekly "First Fiction" Pick for Spring 2012 * “A crazy ambidextrous delight. A drunk...

The Noodle Maker

by Ma Jian & Flora Drew

From Ma Jian, the highly acclaimed Chinese dissident, comes a satirical novel about the absurdities of life in a post-Tiananmen China.

Two men meet for dinner each week. Over the course of one of these drunken...

Madras on Rainy Days

by Samina Ali

Layla is torn among clashing identities--dutiful Muslim daughter and free, independent American woman. When she is nineteen, her parents inform Layla that a marriage has been arranged for her to an Indian man...

River of Smoke

by Amitav Ghosh

A Washington Post Notable Fiction Book for 2011

The Ibis, loaded to its gunwales with a cargo of indentured servants, is in the grip of a cyclone in the Bay of Bengal; among the dozens flailing for survival are...

The Sly Company of People Who Care

Ondaatje Prize 2012

by Rahul Bhattacharya

In flight from the tame familiarity of home in Bombay, a twenty-six-year-old cricket journalist chucks his job and arrives in Guyana, a forgotten colonial society of raw, mesmerizing beauty. Amid beautiful,...

The Diving Pool

by Yoko Ogawa & Stephen Snyder

The first major English translation of one of contemporary Japan's bestselling and most celebrated authors

From Akutagawa Award-winning author Yoko Ogawa comes a haunting trio of novellas about love, fertility,...

Ilustrado

Man Asian Literary Prize 2008

by Miguel Syjuco

Garnering international prizes and acclaim before its publication, Ilustrado has been called “brilliantly conceived and stylishly executed . . .It is also ceaselessly entertaining, frequently raunchy, and...

The Housekeeper and the Professor

by Yoko Ogawa

He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem—ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory.  She is an astute young Housekeeper—with a ten-year-old...

Sea of Poppies

by Amitav Ghosh

At the heart of this vibrant saga is a vast ship, the Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean; its purpose, to fight China’s vicious nineteenth-century Opium Wars. As for the crew,...