At fourteen, she finds herself traded in marriage to a stranger across the ocean in the fascinating land of Malaysia. Duped into thinking her new husband is wealthy, she instead finds herself struggling to raise a family with a man too impractical to face reality and a world that is, by turns, unyielding and amazing, brutal and beautiful. Giving birth to a child every year until she is nineteen, Lakshmi becomes a formidable matriarch, determined to wrest from the world a better life for her daughters and sons and to face every new challenge with almost mythic strength.By sheer willpower Lakshmi survives the nightmare of World War II and the Japanese occupation -- but not unscathed. The family bears deep scars on its back and in turn inflicts those wounds on the next generation. But it is not until Lakshmi's great-granddaughter, Nisha, pieces together the mosaic of her family history that the legacy of the Rice Mother bears fruit.

    When renowned translator Hanne Schubert falls down a flight of stairs, her injury is an unusual but real condition--the loss of her native language. She is left speaking only Japanese, a language learned later in life. With her personal life at a crossroad, Hanne leaves for Japan. There, the Japanese novelist whose work she translated stunningly confronts her publicly for sabotaging his work. Reeling, Hanne struggles for meaning and seeks out the inspiration for the author's novel--a tortured, chimerical actor, once a master in the art of Noh theater. Through their passionate and intriguing relationship, Hanne begins to understand the masks she has worn in her life, just as the actor dons the masks that have made him a legend of Noh. The demons from her past and present begin to unfold and Hanne sets out to make amends in this searing and engrossing novel.

    Since she left home, Sonya has lived on the run, free of any ties, while her soft-spoken sister, Trisha, has created a perfect suburban life, and her ambitious sister, Marin, has built her own successful career. But as these women come together, their various methods of coping with a terrifying history can no longer hold their memories at bay.Buried secrets rise to the surface as their father—the victim of humiliating racism and perpetrator of horrible violence—remains unconscious. As his condition worsens, the daughters and their mother wrestle with private hopes for his survival or death, as well as their own demons and buried secrets. Told with forceful honesty, Trail of Broken Wings reveals the burden of shame and secrets, the toxicity of cruelty and aggression, and the exquisite, liberating power of speaking and owning truth.

    He struggles to find the strength and courage to survive in his new surroundings, which are governed by an unusual race-based code. Bodee’s circle of family and friends help him successfully manage some initial tests of his perseverance, but when he finds himself alone and confronted with an overwhelming challenge, he isn’t sure he’s up to the task. Stand and fight or cut and run? Running is what he knows. Running is what will keep him safe. Will Bodee find the courage to fight, or will he simply do what he has always done? Pick up a copy to find out. MINETTA LANE, the third volume in A. Robert Allen’s Slavery and Beyond series, is a stand-alone novel that continues the broad themes of the first two volumes, Failed Moments and A Wave From Mama.

    The struggles, rivalries, intricate family politics, and the interplay of personalities and relationships within the complex private world of a polygamous union come to life in The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives—Big Love and The 19th Wife set against a contemporary African background.

    When he rebuffs her clumsy advances, Isabella leaves for London, determined to find the man of her dreams and soothe her bruised ego.Michael Linfield, Duke of Blackmore is a legendary, fearsome, war hero; famous for reducing debutantes and their mothers to floods of tears with just one glance. The brooding, giant of a man is hiding a secret however - a debilitating stammer that has haunted him since childhood. When the delightful Miss Peregrine proposes a marriage of convenience to him - with no benefits - Michael is so startled that his stammer reappears and all he can manage to reply is "N-n-no".When news of Isabella's success in London soon reaches his ears, Michael is determined to go to town and win her as his own, if only she'll give him a second chance at love.The Duke’s BrotherCan a Duke's bastard win the heart of a lady?Plucked as an orphan from the slums of St. Giles' by his half-brother the Duke of Blackmore, Sebastian Black soon rises to become one of the richest men in London, and a notorious rake to boot. His time at Eton has left him with a healthy disregard for the aristocracy - that is until he inadvertently becomes involved in the affairs of the prim, proper and snooty Aurelia St Claire.Aurelia's brother, Lord Theodore Epsom, was reported missing after Waterloo, but she is convinced that she has sighted him alive and well in London. The pair join forces to try to discover exactly what happened to Theo and as their sleuthing takes them into London's murky back alleys, they discover that they aren’t so different after all.Can two people overcome their prejudices, their foibles - or even their very history - to find love?A Lady Like No Other“Would my lady care to dance?”“My lady would rather eat a live chicken.”Beautiful, titled, and wealthy to boot, Lady Lydia Beaufort was expected to have a spectacular London Season. There was just one problem; the eccentric daughter of the Earl of Galway had no intention of becoming the ton’s darling. Especially if it involved humouring the awful herds of fortune hunters and greedy second sons, intent on making her their bride.All Lydia wanted was to be left alone in peace, to read her beloved Lord Byron. That is until an incorrigible rogue of a Marquess burst into her life, and turned all her ideas about love upside down.Charming, congenial, and ever so handsome, Gabriel Livingstone, Marquess of Sutherland could have his pick of any of the season’s debutantes, but the only rose he longed to pluck, was the very thorny Lady Beaufort. Just when he thinks he might finally have won her heart, fate, in the form of an Italian Count, a mischievous Gypsy and a political assassination plot, gets in his way.Can this mismatched pair find their happily ever after?

    In 1978 six refugees—a girl, her father, and four “uncles”—are pulled from the sea to begin a new life in San Diego. In the child’s imagination, the world is transmuted into an unearthly realm: she sees everything intensely, hears the distress calls of inanimate objects, and waits for her mother to join her. But life loses none of its strangeness when the family is reunited. As the girl grows, her matter-of-fact innocence eddies increasingly around opaque and ghostly traumas: the cataclysm that engulfed her homeland, the memory of a brother who drowned and, most inescapable, her father’s hopeless rage.

    Set during the tumult of World War II, on the lush Malayan island of Penang, The Gift of Rain tells a riveting and poignant tale about a young man caught in the tangle of wartime loyalties and deceits.

    From a young Vietnamese refugee who suffers profound culture shock when he comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, to a woman whose husband is suffering from dementia and starts to confuse her for a former lover, to a girl living in Ho Chi Minh City whose older half-sister comes back from America having seemingly accomplished everything she never will, the stories are a captivating testament to the dreams and hardships of immigration.

    The compelling sequel to the top-selling Lincolnshire saga Tangled Threads, this is a captivating story of love, war and courage.

    There Felicia finds herself wedded to an uncanny and dangerous world, full of mystery and violence, where objects tell tales, the dead come and go, and the past is as potent as the present. First published in Holland in 1955, Maria Dermoût's novel was immediately recognized as a magical work, like nothing else Dutch—or European—literature had seen before. The Ten Thousand Things is an entranced vision of a far-off place that is as convincingly real and intimate as it is exotic, a book that is at once a lament and an ecstatic ode to nature and life.

    The Kaiser-i-Hind is en route to Bombay. In Cabin D38, Viva Hollowat, an inexperienced chaperone, is worried she's made a terrible mistake. Her advert in The Lady has resulted in three unsettling charges to be escorted to India.Rose, a beautiful, dangerously naive English girl, is about to be married to the cavalry officer she has met only a handful of times.Victoria, the bridesmaid, is determined to lose her virginity on the journey before finding a husband of her own in India. And overshadowing all three of them, the malevolent presence of Guy Glover, a strange and disturbed schoolboy.Three potential Memsahibs with a myriad of reasons for leaving England, but the cargo of hopes and secrets they carry has done little to prepare them for what lies ahead.From the parties of the wealthy Bombay socialites to the poverty of the orphans on Tamarind Street, East of the Sun is everything a historical novel should be: alive with glorious detail, fascinating characters and masterful storytelling.

    India is fractured and divided into kingdoms, each independent and wary of one another, seemingly no match for the might of the English. But when they arrive in the Kingdom of Jhansi, the British army is met with a surprising challenge.Instead of surrendering, Queen Lakshmi raises two armies - one male and one female - and rides into battle, determined to protect her country and her people. Although her soldiers may not appear at first to be formidable against superior British weaponry and training, Lakshmi refuses to back down from the empire that is determined to take away the land she loves.Told from the unexpected perspective of Sita - Queen Lakshmi's most favored companion and most trusted soldier in the all-female army - Rebel Queen shines a light on a time and place rarely explored in historical fiction. In the tradition of her best-selling novel, Nefertiti ,and through her strong, independent heroines fighting to make their ways in a male-dominated world, Michelle Moran brings nineteenth-century India to rich, vibrant life.

    A story of hope, a story of survival, and an incredible journey of escape, 'The Unwanted' is the only memoir by an Amerasian who stayed behind in Vietnam after the fall of Saigon and who is now living in America.

    To this day, Sai Jinhua is a legend in her native land of China, and this is her story, told the way it might have been.The year is 1881. Seven-year-old Jinhua is left an orphan, alone and unprotected after her mandarin father’s summary execution for the crime of speaking the truth. She is sold to a brothel-keeper and subjected to the worst of human nature. Will the private ritual that is her father’s legacy and the wise friendship of the crippled brothel maid be enough to sustain her? When an elegant but troubled scholar takes Jinhua as his concubine, she enters the close world of his jealous first wife. Yet it is Jinhua who accompanies him--as Emissary to the foreign devil nations of Prussia, Austro-Hungary, and Russia--on an exotic journey to Vienna. As he struggles to play his part in China's early, blundering diplomatic engagement with the western world, Jinhua’s eyes and heart are opened to the irresistible possibilities of a place that is mesmerizing and strange, where she will struggle against the constraints of tradition and her husband’s authority and seek to find “Great Love.”Sai Jinhua is an altered woman when she returns to a changed and changing China, where a dangerous clash of cultures pits East against West.