Great Reads: Home

by Mohsin Hamid

Call Number: F H216m EXI

Awards

• Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction
• Aspen Words Literary Prize
• Man Booker Prize finalist
• Dayton Literary Peace Prize finalist
• 10 Best Books of 2017, New York Times Book Review
• National Book Critics Circle Award finalist
• Kirkus Award finalist

In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet—sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors—doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through. . . .

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Call Number: F N576v SYM

Awards

• Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2016
• Dayton Literary Peace Prize
• Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
• Asian/Pacific American Award for LIterature
• PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

The narrator, a communist double agent, is a “man of two minds,” a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who arranges to come to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam. The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping espionage novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship.

by Liu Cixin, translated by Ken Liu

Call Number: F L783c THR

Awards

• Hugo Award winner 2015
• Chinese Science Fiction Yinhe Award winner 2006
• Nebula Award winner 2-14

Set against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion.

F ZAM

Classic dystopian novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin. 

"One thousand years after the One State's conquest of the entire world, the spaceship Integral is being built in order to invade and conquer extraterrestrial planets. Meanwhile, the project's chief engineer, D-503, begins a journal that he intends to be carried upon the completed spaceship." --Wikipedia

By Teffi (Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya)

Call Number: 891.7342 TEF

"Ranging from portraits of Rasputin and Lenin to observations on the Russian Revolution, and from profiles of cultural figures to moving domestic scenes, this short collection includes writings by the inimitable Teffi never before published in English." --Publisher

by Sinclair Lewis

Call Number: 813.52 LEW

"In 1935, Sinclair Lewis sat down to write a novel about political radicalisation and social upheaval in the depression-ravaged US. What emerged after four months of feverish work was It Can’t Happen Here, a runaway bestseller that quickly sold more than 300,000 copies." --The Guardian

by Gary Shteyngart

Call Number: F SH561g SUP

"Blending sharp satire with moving portraits of love between lonely people, Gary Shteyngart's fiendishly clever third novel leaves you wondering whether that dull ache in your stomach is from laughter or just plain sadness." --The Guardian

by Wang Jinkang

Call Number: F WAN

"On the surface, the life of young scientist Mei Yin seems perfect. She runs her own research institute in China, she’s getting married, and she founded an orphanage that helps hundreds of girls. But Mei Yin has a dark secret—three vials of “Satan’s gift,” a deadly smallpox virus left over from Russian scientific research conducted during the Cold War. She’s determined to find a vaccine, even if that means endangering those she holds dear." --Amazon

by Marilynne Robinson

Call Number: F R658m LIL

Awards:

• National Book Award finalist
• National Book Critics Circle Award winner

"Lila, homeless and alone after years of roaming the countryside, steps inside a small-town Iowa church-the only available shelter from the rain-and ignites a romance and a debate that will reshape her life. She becomes the wife of a minister, John Ames, and begins a new existence while trying to make sense of the life that preceded her newfound security." --Amazon

by Min Jin Lee

Call Number: F L477M PAC [English edition]
KOR F LEE PAC v.1-2 [Korean edition]

Awards

• Best Fiction of 2017 - Chicago Review of Books, BBC, The Guardian, New York TImes
• National Book Award finalist

In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations.

by Kelli Estes

Call Number: F ES79k GIR

Inara Erickson is exploring her deceased aunt's island estate when she finds an elaborately stitched piece of fabric hidden in the house. As she peels back layer upon layer of the secrets it holds, Inara's life becomes interwoven with that of Mei Lein, a young Chinese girl mysteriously driven from her home a century before. Through the stories Mei Lein tells in silk, Inara uncovers a tragic truth that will shake her family to its core ― and force her to make an impossible choice.

by Ken Liu

Call Number: F L783k DAN Bk1

Awards

• Nebula Award finalist

Wily, charming Kuni Garu, a bandit, and stern, fearless Mata Zyndu, the son of a deposed duke, seem like polar opposites. Yet, in the uprising against the emperor, the two quickly become the best of friends after a series of adventures fighting against vast conscripted armies, silk-draped airships, and shapeshifting gods. Once the emperor has been overthrown, however, they each find themselves the leader of separate factions—two sides with very different ideas about how the world should be run and the meaning of justice. 

Sequel: The Wall of Storms

by Peter Verhelst

F VER

"In his poignant dystopian novella The Man I Became, Belgian novelist Peter Verhelst grapples with the building blocks of humanity, asking whether socially-learned behaviour is all that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom." -- The Oxford Culture Review

By Teffi (Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya)

Call Number: 891.7342 TEF

"The writer and satirist Teffi was a literary sensation in Russia until war and revolution forced her to leave her country for ever. Memories is a blackly funny and heartbreaking account of her final, frantic journey into exile across Russia – travelling by cart, freight train and rickety steamer – and the ‘ordinary and unheroic’ people she encounters." -- Publisher

by Isaac Babel

Call Number: 891.73 BAB

"Lively tales from Russia’s first modernist about the Ukrainian port city once run by Jewish gangsters." --The Guardian

by Tracey Lindberg

Call Number: F 742t BIR

Awards

• CBC Canada Reads
• KOBO Emerging Writer Prize
• OLA Evergreen Award

"Bernice is a Cree woman who was born and spent her childhoood on a reserve in northern Alberta. From there, she is sent to a Christian school, foster care, and a psychiatric hospital, and eventually ends up living on the streets of Edmonton, Alta. Finally, she moves from Alberta to Gibsons, B.C., ostensibly in hopes of meeting a native actor whom she idolized as a teen." --Publisher's Weekly

by Philip Roth

Call Number:813.54 ROT

A what-if story in which Charles Lindbergh, the aviation hero and Nazi sympathizer, is elected President in 1940, leading to the widespread persecution of Jews in the United States. --New Yorker

Call Number: 839.313 ZWA

"A husband forms gruesome plans for his new fridge; a government employee has a haunting experience on his commute home; prisoners serve as entertainment for wealthy party guests; an army officer suffers a monstrous tropical illness. These short stories contain some of the most groundbreaking and innovative writing in Dutch literature from 1915 to the present day, with most pieces appearing here in English for the first time." --Amazon