In middle-class Lahore, the fatherless Zaki Shirazi grows up in an unusual Muslim family, a family of women. The matriarchs of his world are strong and outspoken: his mother, Zakia, is a journalist and activist; his paternal grandmother, Daadi, is a shrewd navigator of the mores of her culture; his slightly older cousin, Samar Api, acts as his beloved ally and friend; and Naseem, the stalwart servant woman, is a sharpeyed judge of character. Through the lives of these remarkable women (and...

On the lush coast of Sri Lanka, a talented and beautiful young woman, Nulani, returns day after day to the verandah of a beach house to paint. Her subject is Theo, a writer attempting to heal from a tragic loss and struggling to complete a faltering novel. Just as love blossoms between them, the country is shaken by civil war. Through the years that follow, Nulani and Theo must depend upon their memories and the art that once brought them together to find the strength to face their much ch...

Meet Akhila: forty-five and single, an income-tax clerk, and a woman who has never been allowed to live her own life - always the daughter, the sister, the aunt, the provider - until the day she gets herself a one-way ticket to the seaside town of Kanyakumari. In the intimate atmosphere of the all-women sleeping car - the 'Ladies Coupe' - Akhila asks the five women the question that has been haunting her all her adult life: can a woman stay single and be happy, or does she need a man to fe...

The author of The Wasted Vigil gives us a searing, exquisitely written novel set in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the months following 9/11--a story of war, of one family's losses, and of the simplest, most enduring human impulses.Jeo and Mikal, foster brothers from a small Pakistani town, secretly enter Afghanistan: not to fight with the Taliban against the Americans, but rather to help care for wounded civilians. Their good intentions, though, can't keep them out of harm's...

Set in Mumbai during the Hindu-Muslim conflict of the early 1990s, The Fourth Passenger is the story of four women raised with traditional Indian values, whose partnership give them the temerity to stand up against religious extremism. Having reached their thirties and disillusioned with their lives and husbands, their decision to open an urban food stand is mingled with their memories of a distant past when two of them loved the same man. But, in order to establish their fledglin...

Grace de Silva, a mother of five, struggles to hold her family and her crumbling marriage together as civil unrest stirs in Sri Lanka. Her husband is charming but shiftless, and her children are poised to pursue their dreams for the future. Jacob, her eldest, wants to leave home for England, while Frieda longs to remain in her homeland. Thornton, Grace’s favourite son, dreams of becoming a poet; his sister Alicia wants to be a concert pianist. But when Grace’s youngest son, Christopher, be...

Conspiracies and paranoia sweep across England in the aftermath of the French Revolution, landing tea broker James Tilly Matthews in Bethlem Hospital, a notorious, crumbling home for the insane. Although delusional, Matthews also appears to be incarcerated for unspecified political reasons, a pawn in a cruel game of ambition and power.Extraordinarily evocative of time and place, Bedlam sweeps the reader into a world teetering between darkness and light, love and hate. Inte...

Jean Hubbard, forty-six, is a syndicated health columnist, her British husband, Mark, a successful advertising executive, and after more than twenty years together they revel in a sabbatical on a remote tropical island. But when Jean discovers a salacious love letter addressed to Mark, she realizes that she has misdiagnosed some acute pathologies in her own life. The long idyll of their mutual ease is over -- but a more vivid and compelling quest has just begun. Looking for answers, Jean g...

At the end of the Civil War, Britt Johnson, a freed black man, travels with his family from Kentucky to start a new life in Texas. But this wild country holds dangers of its own. When his wife and children are captured during an Indian raid, Britt vows to bring them home or die trying. But his determination and courage quickly land him in the thick of a battle he wants no part of -- the struggle between the U.S. government and the Kiowa and Comanche tribes, whose land, freedom and culture ...

At the outbreak of the Civil War, nineteen-year-old EmilyHudson is dispatched into the care of her distant and colduncle, to spend the summer at his beach house in Newport.She is an orphan, the sole member of her family not claimedby consumption. Her spirit and vibrancy are at odds with thiswealthy yet forbidding family, and also with the stilted climate of American society. It is Emily’s cousin William, himself an outsider, who is her saviour. His friend...

A courageous and timely novel, Tears of Mehndi explores the rich, complex and often heartbreaking lives of a tight-knit community in Vancouver’s Little India. Through the perspectives of several women whose lives intertwine over a generation, Raminder Sidhu deftly exposes the shrouded violence within the Indo-Canadian community, a difficult and often dissembled subject. Sidhu’s characters are women caught between two cultures, struggling to understand the traditions they are oblig...

M. J. Hyland is the multi-award-winning and Man Booker-shortlisted author of Carry Me Down. Her third novel, This Is How, is a psychologically probing and deeply moving account of a perpetual outsider longing to find his niche. When Patrick Oxtoby’s fiancée breaks off their engagement, he leaves home and moves to a remote seaside village. In spite of his hopes for a new and better life, Patrick struggles to fit in and make the right impression. Certain that his new friend...