Once on a Moonless Night


Book Description

A young French woman in Peking in the late 1970s interprets between Chinese professors and Bertolucci for his film The Last Emperor. Afterwards, she follows a disgruntled old professor who tells her about a text believed to be taken directly from Buddha s




A Moonless, Starless Sky


Book Description

WINNER OF THE 2018 PEN OPEN BOOK AWARD "A rich and urgently necessary book" (New York Times Book Review), A Moonless, Starless Sky is a masterful, humane work of journalism by Alexis Okeowo--a vivid narrative of Africans who are courageously resisting their continent's wave of fundamentalism. In A Moonless, Starless Sky Okeowo weaves together four narratives that form a powerful tapestry of modern Africa: a young couple, kidnap victims of Joseph Kony's LRA; a Mauritanian waging a lonely campaign against modern-day slavery; a women's basketball team flourishing amid war-torn Somalia; and a vigilante who takes up arms against the extremist group Boko Haram. This debut book by one of America's most acclaimed young journalists illuminates the inner lives of ordinary people doing the extraordinary--lives that are too often hidden, underreported, or ignored by the rest of the world.




Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch


Book Description

Having enchanted readers on two continents with Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie now produces a rapturous and uproarious collision of East and West, a novel about the dream of love and the love of dreams. Fresh from 11 years in Paris studying Freud, bookish Mr. Muo returns to China to spread the gospel of psychoanalysis. His secret purpose is to free his college sweetheart from prison. To do so he has to get on the good side of the bloodthirsty Judge Di, and to accomplish that he must provide the judge with a virgin maiden. This may prove difficult in a China that has embraced western sexual mores along with capitalism–especially since Muo, while indisputably a romantic, is no ladies’ man. Tender, laugh-out-loud funny, and unexpectedly wise, Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch introduces a hero as endearingly inept as Inspector Clouseau and as valiant as Don Quixote.




Dark Moonless Night


Book Description

Seven years ago, Caroline had considered Gareth Morgan unsuitable as a husband. Now she was to find herself part of Gareth's life again when she got a job in Central Africa where he was living. And Gareth wasted no time in telling her, "If you have any foolish notions of trying to rekindle old fires, you'll be wasting your time!" But did she want to rekindle old fires? In England there was Jeremy Brent, eager to marry her; and now, in Africa, Nicolas Freeleng made it clear he found her attractive. What did it matter how Gareth felt?




Full Cicada Moon


Book Description

In 1969 twelve-year-old Mimi and her family move to an all-white town in Vermont, where Mimi's mixed-race background and interest in "boyish" topics like astronomy make her feel like an outsider.




Saturn Peach


Book Description

In Saturn Peach, Lily Wang establishes a distinctive voice that is part heartbreak and part wise witness chronicling the strangeness of a technologized world. When asked to describe her book, Wang answered in her quintessential way, "There are things I never want to know but always know. Every day I live with them. Every day I live. I am like a young fruit. Like a peach, common, not the popular kind but oblate, saturn. I live and inside me this pale fruit, yellow and white. I take bites out of myself and share them with you. Maybe you taste like me. Maybe you hold this fruit and become a tree." If ever there were a book that disarmingly - and seemingly effortlessly - encouraged its reader to become a metaphor, then Saturn Peach is it.




Once on a Moonless Night


Book Description

A precious scroll inscribed with a lost Buddhist sutra—once owned by Pu Yi, the last emperor of China—is illicitly sold to an eccentric French linguist, Paul d’Ampere, who is imprisoned as a result. In jail, he devotes himself to studying its ancient text. A young Western scholar in China hears this account from the grocer Toomchooq, whose name mysteriously connects him to the document. She falls in love with both teller and tale, but when d’Ampere is killed in prison, Toomchooq disappears, and she, pregnant with his child, embarks on a search for her lost love and the scroll that begins, “Once on a moonless night . . .”




Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress


Book Description

An enchanting literary debut—already an international best-seller. At the height of Mao’s infamous Cultural Revolution, two boys are among hundreds of thousands exiled to the countryside for “re-education.” The narrator and his best friend, Luo, guilty of being the sons of doctors, find themselves in a remote village where, among the peasants of Phoenix mountain, they are made to cart buckets of excrement up and down precipitous winding paths. Their meager distractions include a violin—as well as, before long, the beautiful daughter of the local tailor. But it is when the two discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation that their re-education takes its most surprising turn. While ingeniously concealing their forbidden treasure, the boys find transit to worlds they had thought lost forever. And after listening to their dangerously seductive retellings of Balzac, even the Little Seamstress will be forever transformed. From within the hopelessness and terror of one of the darkest passages in human history, Dai Sijie has fashioned a beguiling and unexpected story about the resilience of the human spirit, the wonder of romantic awakening and the magical power of storytelling.




Once A Soldier


Book Description

Travis’ father was a failed soldier, a coward and a heartless bully who tried to disown his son. Now Travis is determined to shame him by becoming the soldier his father could never have been – through joining the Parachute Regiment, the élite of the British Army. His restless urge to prove himself takes him from country to country and from army to army, where he battles with enemies both external and internal until he is finally able to put horror and tragedy behind him and find honour, love and peace. ‘The sounds of the battle were like some crazy symphony, orchestrated by a mad composer and led by an even madder conductor who had decided to play all his heavy brass instruments at the same time and all of his percussion, bass drums pounding amid the deafening clashes of cymbals. His instruments were automatic rifle fire, hand grenades, grenade launchers, claymore mines, light and heavy machine guns and mortars. For vocals he had the screams of the wounded and dying.’ ‘A killer story, with a strong emotional core, powerful themes that will touch hearts and a believable protagonist’ - Kaye Jones, History in an Hour




Once There Was


Book Description

When fifteen-year-old Iranian American Marjan discovers her murdered father was secretly a veterinarian to magical creatures, she realizes she must take up his mantle, despite the many dangers.