Imaginary Travel All Over the Map
Explore the world through books with Imaginary Travel All Over the Map! Discover captivating reads that transport you to far-off destinations without leaving home.
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Death of a Red Heroine
by Qiu Xiaolong
Qiu Xiaolong's Anthony Award-winning debut introduces Inspector Chen of the Shanghai Police. A young ânational model worker,â renowned for her adherence to the principles of the Communist Party, turns up dead in a Shanghai canal. As Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Special Cases Bureau struggles to trace the hidden threads of her past, he finds himself challenging the very political forces that have guided his life since birth. Chen must tiptoe around his superiors if he wants to get to the bottom of this crime, and risk his careerâperhaps even his lifeâto see justice done.
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The Glass Palace
by Amitav Ghosh
NATIONAL BESTSELLER ⢠NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND LOS ANGELES TIMES âA rich, layered epic that probes the meaning of identity and homelandâ a literary territory that is as resonant now, in our globalized culture, as it was when the sun never set on the British Empire.ââLos Angeles Times Book Review Set in Burma during the British invasion of 1885, this masterly novel tells the story of Rajkumar, a poor boy lifted on the tides of political and social chaos, who goes on to create an empire in the Burmese teak forest. When soldiers force the royal family out of the Glass Palace and into exile, Rajkumar befriends Dolly, a young woman in the court of the Burmese Queen, whose love will shape his life. He cannot forget her, and years later, as a rich man, he goes in search of her. The struggles that have made Burma, India, and Malaya the places they are today are illuminated in this wonderful novel by the writer Chitra Divakaruni calls âa master storyteller.â Praise for The Glass Palace âAn absorbing story of a world in transition, brought to life through characters who love and suffer with equal intensity.ââJ. M. Coetzee âThere is no denying Ghoshâs command of culture and history. . . . [He] proves a writer of supreme skill and intelligence.ââThe Atlantic Monthly âI will never forget the young and old Rajkumar, Dolly, the Princesses, the forests of teak, the wealth that made families and wars. A wonderful novel. An incredible story.ââGrace Paley âA novelist of dazzling ingenuity.ââSan Francisco Chronicle
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The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ⢠An instant classic and eerily prescient cultural phenomenon, from âthe patron saint of feminist dystopian fictionâ (The New York Times). Now an award-winning Hulu series starring Elizabeth Moss. Look for The Testaments, the bestselling, award-winning the sequel to The Handmaidâs Tale In Margaret Atwoodâs dystopian future, environmental disasters and declining birthrates have led to a Second American Civil War. The result is the rise of the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian regime that enforces rigid social roles and enslaves the few remaining fertile women. Offred is one of these, a Handmaid bound to produce children for one of Gileadâs commanders. Deprived of her husband, her child, her freedom, and even her own name, Offred clings to her memories and her will to survive. At once a scathing satire, an ominous warning, and a tour de force of narrative suspense, The Handmaidâs Tale is a modern classic. Includes an introduction by Margaret Atwood
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After Dark
by ćä¸ćĽć¨š
With his trademark humor and psychological insight, Murakami's power of observation plays out in this sleek novel of encounters set in Tokyo during the witching hours between midnight and dawn.
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The Yiddish Policemen's Union
by Michael Chabon
For sixty years, Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in the wake of revelations of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. Proud, grateful, and longing to be American, the Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant, gritty, soulful, and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. For sixty years they have been left alone, neglected and half-forgotten in a backwater of history. Now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end: once again the tides of history threaten to sweep them up and carry them off into the unknown. But homicide detective Meyer Landsman of the District Police has enough problems without worrying about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster. He and his half-Tlingit partner, Berko Shemets, can't catch a break in any of their outstanding cases. Landsman's new supervisor is the love of his lifeâand also his worst nightmare. And in the cheap hotel where he has washed up, someone has just committed a murderâright under Landsman's nose. Out of habit, obligation, and a mysterious sense that it somehow offers him a shot at redeeming himself, Landsman begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy. But when word comes down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediately, Landsman soon finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, hopefulness, evil, and salvation that are his heritageâand with the unfinished business of his marriage to Bina Gelbfish, the one person who understands his darkest fears. At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, an homage to 1940s noir, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a novel only Michael Chabon could have written.
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Saving Fish from Drowning
by Amy Tan
âA rollicking, adventure-filled story . . . packed [with] the human capacity for love.â âUSA Today âA superbly executed, good-hearted farce that is part romance and part mystery . . . With Tanâs many talents on display, itâs her idiosyncratic wit and sly observations . . . that make this book pure pleasure.â âSan Francisco Chronicle San Francisco art patron Bibi Chen has planned a journey of the senses along the famed Burma Road for eleven lucky friends. But after her mysterious death, Bibi watches aghast from her ghostly perch as the travelers veer off her itinerary and embark on a trail paved with cultural gaffes and tribal curses, Buddhist illusions and romantic desires. On Christmas morning, the tourists cruise across a misty lake and disappear. With picaresque characters and mesmerizing imagery, Saving Fish from Drowning gives us a voice as idiosyncratic, sharp, and affectionate as the mothers of The Joy Luck Club. Bibi is the observant eye of human natureâthe witness of good intentions and bad outcomes, of desperate souls and those who wish to save them. In the end, Tan takes her readers to that place in their own heart where hope is found. âAmy Tan is among our great storytellers.â âThe New York Times Book Review âAmy Tan has created an almost magical adventure that, page by page, becomes a metaphor for human relationships.â âIsabel Allende âWith humor, ruthlessness, and wild imagination, Tan has reaped [a] fantastic tale of human longings and (of course) their consequences.â âElle âA book thatâs easy to read and hard to forget.â âNewsweek
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ID: 1841952427
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Middlesex
by Jeffrey Eugenides
Three generations of a Greek American family find themselves plagued by a mutant gene which causes bizarre side effects in the family's teenage girls.
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Snow
by Orhan Pamuk
After years of lonely political exile, Turkish poet Ka returns to Istanbul to attend his mother's funeral and learns about a series of suicides among pious girls forbidden to wear headscarves.
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A Wild Sheep Chase
by Haruki Murakami
A New York Times bestselling authorâand âa mythmaker for the millennium, a wiseacre wisemanâ (New York Times Book Review)âdelivers a surreal and elaborate quest that takes readers from Tokyo to the remote mountains of northern Japan, where the unnamed protagonist has a surprising confrontation with his demons. An advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend and casually appropriates the image for an advertisement. What he doesnât realize is that included in the scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has unwittingly captured the attention of a man who offers a menacing ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences.
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The Poisonwood Bible
by Barbara Kingsolver
The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.
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The Time Traveler's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger
A Magical love story that is as sad as it is joyous.
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The Shadow of the Wind
by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The New York Times bestseller âThe Shadow of the Wind is ultimately a love letter to literature, intended for readers as passionate about storytelling as its young hero.â âEntertainment Weekly (Editor's Choice) âOne gorgeous read.â âStephen King Barcelona, 1945: A city slowly heals in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and Daniel, an antiquarian book dealerâs son who mourns the loss of his mother, finds solace in a mysterious book entitled The Shadow of the Wind, by one JuliĂĄn Carax. But when he sets out to find the authorâs other works, he makes a shocking discovery: someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book Carax has written. In fact, Daniel may have the last of Caraxâs books in existence. Soon Danielâs seemingly innocent quest opens a door into one of Barcelonaâs darkest secrets--an epic story of murder, madness, and doomed love.
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A Conspiracy of Paper
by David Liss
Benjamin Weaver, a Jew and an ex-boxer, is an outsider in eighteenth-century London, tracking down debtors and felons for aristocratic clients. The son of a wealthy stock trader, he lives estranged from his familyâuntil he is asked to investigate his fatherâs sudden death. Thus Weaver descends into the deceptive world of the English stock jobbers, gliding between coffee houses and gaming houses, drawing rooms and bordellos. The more Weaver uncovers, the darker the truth becomes, until he realizes that he is following too closely in his fatherâs footstepsâand they just might lead him to his own grave. An enthralling historical thriller, A Conspiracy of Paper will leave readers wondering just how much has changed in the stock market in the last three hundred years. . . .
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The Tortilla Curtain
by T.C. Boyle
T.C. Boyleâs âirresistibleâ (Entertainment Weekly) classic bestseller, a tragicomic novel about assimilation, immigration, and the price of the American dream âA masterpiece of contemporary social satire.â âThe Wall Street Journal WINNER OF THE PRIX MĂDICIS ĂTRANGER Topanga Canyon is home to two couples on a collision course. Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher lead an ordered sushi-and-recycling existence in a newly gated hilltop community: he a sensitive nature writer, she an obsessive realtor. Undocumented immigrants CĂĄndido and AmĂŠrica RincĂłn desperately cling to their vision of the American Dream as they fight off starvation in a makeshift camp deep in the ravine. And from the moment a freak accident brings CĂĄndido and Delaney into intimate contact, these four and their opposing worlds gradually intersect in what becomes a dramatic comedy of error and prejudice.
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In the Time of the Butterflies
by Julia Alvarez
Set during the waning days of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republica in 1960, this extraordinary novel tells the story the Mirabal sisters, three young wives and mothers who are assassinated after visiting their jailed husbands.
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The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini
The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father's servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption, and it is also about the power of fathers over sonsâtheir love, their sacrifices, their lies. The first Afghan novel to be written in English, The Kite Runner tells a sweeping story of family, love, and friendship against a backdrop of history that has not been told in fiction before, bringing to mind the large canvases of the Russian writers of the nineteenth century. But just as it is old-fashioned in its narration, it is contemporary in its subject-the devastating history of Afghanistan over the last thirty years. As emotionally gripping as it is tender, The Kite Runner is an unusual and powerful debut.
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ID: 1582430330
(Type: books)
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The Death of Vishnu
by Manil Suri
Suffused with Hindu mythology, this bestselling story of one apartment building becomes a metaphor for the social and religious divisions of contemporary India, and Vishnu's ascent of the staircase parallels the soul's progress through the various stages of existence.
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Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
NOBEL PRIZE WINNER ⢠From the acclaimed, bestselling author of The Remains of the Day comes âa Gothic tour de force" (The New York Times) with an extraordinary twistâa moving, suspenseful, beautifully atmospheric modern classic. One of The New York Timesâs 10 Best Books of the 21st Century As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were. Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them specialâand how that gift will shape the rest of their time together.
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
by Michael Chabon
This brilliant epic novel set in New York and Prague introduces us to two misfit young men who make it big by creating comic-book superheroes. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdiniesque escape, has just smuggled himself out of Nazi-invaded Prague and landed in New York City. His Brooklyn cousin Sammy Clay is looking for a partner to create heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit America the comic book. Inspired by their own fears and dreams, Kavalier and Clay create the Escapists, The Monitor, and Luna Moth, inspired by the beautiful Rosa Saks, who will become linked by powerful ties to both men. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is the winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
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Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie
The story of Saleem Sinal, born precisely at midnight, August 15, 1947, the moment India became independent. Saleem's life parallels the history of his nation.
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The Maltese Falcon
by Dashiell Hammett
FEATURING THE CHARACTER THAT INSPIRED THE AMC SERIES MONSIEUR SPADE STARRING CLIVE OWEN ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME Detective Sam Spade is a private eye with his own solitary code of ethics. When his partner is killed during a stakeout, he is drawn into the hunt for a fantastic treasure with a dubious provenanceâa golden bird encrusted with jewels. Also on the trail are a perfumed grifter named Joel Cairo, an oversized adventurer named Gutman, and Spadeâs new client Brigid OâShaughnessy, a beautiful and treacherous woman whose loyalties shift at the drop of a dime. These are the ingredients of Dashiell Hammettâs coolly glittering gem of detective fiction, a novel that has haunted generations of readers. *With a new introduction by Richard Russo*