Book picks similar to
Bronze Mirror by Jeanne Larsen
historical-fiction
fiction
fantasy
asian
Pachinko
Min Jin Lee - 2017
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.Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters — strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis — survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.
The Three-Body Problem
Liu Cixin - 2006
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. The result is a science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope and vision.
The Orchid Tree
Siobhan Daiko - 2015
When Japanese forces invade Hong Kong, young Kate is forced into an internment camp - and her life is changed forever.
An evocative read. Renita D'Silva, bestselling author of Monsoon Memories.
The Spirit Ring
Lois McMaster Bujold - 1992
Thur dreams of escaping the mines of Bruinwald. A betrayal at a banquet plunges Thur and Fiametta into a struggle against men who would use vile magic for vile ends.
Old Town
Lin Zhe - 2010
Her narrative ranges across the entire length of China, to California and back again, to the battlefields of the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance and the brutal “struggle" sessions of the Cultural Revolution. But it always returns to this family's home in Old Town, that archetypical, old-fashioned, and vanishing place steeped in the traditions of South China. Ms. Lin examines the inner strength that sustains people's lives in their darkest hours, when religious and political faith falter. And yet, a vein of irony and droll humor runs through this powerful story. Lin Zhe's novel may be understood as a love story, memoir, history, or allegory. For the non-Chinese reader it provides a rare and moving insight into Chinese lives in a century of fearsome upheaval. This book was originally published under the title Riddles of Belief...and Love - A Story.
The Hundred Secret Senses
Amy Tan - 1995
Olivia Laguni is half-Chinese, but typically American in her uneasiness with her patchwork family. And no one in Olivia's family is more embarrassing to her than her half-sister, Kwan Li. For Kwan speaks mangled English, is cheerfully deaf to Olivia's sarcasm, and sees the dead with her "yin eyes."Even as Olivia details the particulars of her decades-long grudge against her sister (who, among other things, is a source of infuriatingly good advice), Kwan Li is telling her own story, one that sweeps us into the splendor, squalor, and violence of Manchu China. And out of the friction between her narrators, Amy Tan creates a work that illuminates both the present and the past sweetly, sadly, hilariously, with searing and vivid prose.
Samurai's Apprentice
David Walters - 2011
All this seems far removed from Kami, a boy who quietly goes about his everyday life in his farm village until one day he trips over the unconsious body of a warrior hidden in the long grass.That discovery will lead him on an adventure across the warring kingdoms, facing assassins and enemy soldiers as he journeys to the capital to face the new Shogun. Through his travels he aspires to become a samurai, and in his many challenges he eventually comes to understand what it means to be one.
Days of Cain
J.R. Dunn - 1997
Dunn, a literary artist of extraordinary vision and courage, comes a haunting exploration of life, death, responsibility, and the devastating power of choice--a gripping and provocative novel that shines a beacon of moral possibility into the darkest corners of the human soul.In the future--when the barriers of Time are barriers no longer--a woman of uncommon strength and character will be recruited to help preserve the integrity of past events; to keep the wheel of history turning so that what is to come remains uncompromised and uncorrupted. But Alma Levin will go renegade, vanishing somewhere into the most violent years of the mid-twentieth century. And it will be the responsibility of her mentor, Gasper James, to bring her back. For useless he can stop her, Alma Levin intends to change history--and the future--with a plan to prevent the slaughter of six million--a plan that is puling former teacher and protigi both into the most terrible place ever conceived by man: Auschwitz.
Flashman At The Charge ;Flashman In The Great Game
George MacDonald Fraser - 1983
Mortal Love
Elizabeth Hand - 2004
Radborne Comstock, one of the early twentieth century's most brilliant young painters, is helpless under her dangerous spell.In modern-day London, journalist Daniel Rowlands meets a beguiling woman who holds the secret to invaluable -- and lost -- Pre-Raphaelite paintings, while wealthy dilettante-actor Valentine Comstock is consumed by enigmatic visions.Swirling between eras and continents, Mortal Love is the intense tale of unforgettable characters caught in a whirlwind of art, love, and intrigue that will take your breath away.
The Song of the Wild Geese
India Millar - 2019
The girl who was plucked from obscurity to become the most sought after geisha in Edo’s Floating World. The geisha who was so beautiful and talented that one of the richest nobles in Japan desired her as his wife.But Terue wanted more from life, and was willing to risk everything to get it. Pregnant with her lover’s child and knowing that the disgrace would mean certain death for both her and her unborn child, Terue makes the devastating choice to flee Japan on the day her daughter – Kazhua, The Geisha with the Green Eyes – was born and changes both their destinies forever.
The Convenient Marriage
Georgette Heyer - 1934
She also has a stammer. But when the enigmatic and eminently eligible Earl of Rule offers for her oldest sister’s hand – a match that makes financial and social sense, but would break her heart – it is Horatia who takes matters into her own impetuous hands. Can she save her family’s fortune? Or is she courting disaster? Witty, charming, elegant, and always delightful, Georgette Heyer – the undisputed queen of Regency Romance – brings the whole period to life with deft precision and glorious characters.
The Didymus Contingency
Jeremy Robinson - 2005
Tom Greenbaum faces that question after successfully discovering the secret to time travel, he knows the time, place and event he will witness: the death and failed resurrection of Jesus Christ. Dr. David Goodman, Tom's colleague and closest friend follows Tom into the past, attempting to avert a time-space catastrophe, but forces beyond their control toss them into a dangerous end game where they are tempted by evil characters, betrayed by friends, pursued by an assassin from the future and haunted by a demon that cannot be killed.
The Undertaking of Lily Chen
Danica Novgorodoff - 2014
Which means that Deshi must find him an eligible body before the week is up. Lily Chen, sweet as a snakebite, needs money and a fast ride out of town. Haunted by the gods of their ancestors and the expectations of the new world, Deshi and Lily embark on a journey with two very different destinations in mind.They travel through a land where the ground is hard and the graves are shallow, where marriage can be murder and where Lily Chen is wanted—dead and alive.
When Fox is a Thousand
Larissa Lai - 1993
Larissa Lai interweaves three narrative voices and their attendant cultures: an elusive fox growing toward wisdom and her 1000 birthday, the ninth-century Taoist poet/nun Yu Hsuan-Chi (a real person executed in China for murder), and the oddly named Artemis, a young Asian-American woman living in contemporary Vancouver.With beautiful and enchanting prose, and a sure narrative hand, Lai combines Chinese mythology, the sexual politics of medieval China, and modern-day Vancouver to masterfully revise the myth of the Fox (a figure who can inhibit women’s bodies in order to cause mischief).