other places

Ten-year-old Ruba lives in a village outside Beirut. From her family home, she can see the buildings shimmering on the horizon and the sea stretched out beside them. She can also hear the rumble of the shelling this is Lebanon in the 1980s and civil war is tearing the country apart. Ruba however has her own worries. Her father hardly ever speaks and spends most of his days sitting in his armchair, avoiding work and family. Her mother looks so sad that Ruba thinks her heart might have withered in the heat like a fig. Her elder brother, Naji, has started to spend his time with older boys and some of them have guns. When Ruba decides she has to save her father, and when she uncovers his secret, she begins a journey which takes her from childhood to the beginnings of adulthood. As Israeli troops invade and danger comes ever closer, she realises that she may not be able to keep her family safe.

Meeting at a hotel swimming pool, beautiful Hutu Gentille and foreign journalist Bernard fall in love and prepare to marry, but when violence breaks out between Gentille's people and the Tutsi, the pair is separated by desperate circumstances.

A disparate group of men and women confronts their own indivudual moral crises, fears, and physical dangers as they work to alleviate the hardships and suffering caused by civil war and famine in contemporary Sudan.

"Angel Tungaraza has recently moved to Rwanda from her native Tanzania. With her husband Pius and the five orphaned children of their late son and daughter, she is hardly short of things to do. But she still finds time to pursue her hobby and her passion: her small but increasingly successful business, baking individually-designed cakes for the parties and celebrations of her neighbours and their friends. As her customers tell her their stories, she comes to realise how much each of them has to mourn as well as how much they have to celebrate. And, finally, she comes to accept how much that is true of her too. -Publisher description.

"Aden,1935; a city vibrant, alive, and full of hidden dangers. And home to Jama, a ten year-old boy. But then his mother dies unexpectedly and he finds himself alone in the world. Jama is forced home to his native Somalia, the land of his nomadic ancestors. War is on the horizon and the fascist Italian forces who control parts of east Africa are preparing for battle. Yet Jama cannot rest until he discovers whether his father, who has been absent from his life since he was a baby, is alive somewhere. And so begins an epic journey which will take Jama north through Djibouti, war-torn Eritrea and Sudan, to Egypt. And from there, aboard a ship transporting Jewish refugees just released from German concentration camp, across the seas to Britain and freedom. This story of one boy's long walk to freedom is also the story of how the Second World War affected Africa and its people; a story of displacement and family. -Publisher.

Following "The night of the Mi'raj" -The burkha-clad body of a young woman is discovered on the grimy sands of Jeddah beach; soon afterwards, a strong-minded American woman finds herself alone and afraid in the most repressive city on earth when her husband suddenly disappears.

Marion and Shiva Stone are twin sons of a secret union between an Indian nun and a British surgeon at "Missing" hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother's death in childbirth and their father's disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the brothers fall in love with the same woman. This tears them apart, forcing Marion to flee his homeland. When his past finally catches up with him, he must put his life in the hands of those he trusts least in the world.

"Shortly after her divorce, advertising executive Lila Nova purchases her first plant. It's a bird-of-paradise, and the seller is David Exley, a rugged country-sexual who seems to promise a paradise of his own making. Lila is immediately obsessed with plants and with the man who sells them, but when David introduces her to the myth of the nine plants of desire, and when she meets a man named Armand who claims to own the nine plants, her obsession reaches unexpected heights: if she can possess all nine plants, the legend goes, her wildest dreams will be fulfilled. But Lila is too trusting, and as a result she is soon off on an adventure she never meant to take: in the Yucatán, alone, hefting a backpack full of travel guides and expensive shampoo, and learning."

The Abulheja family are forcibly removed from their ancestral home in Ein Hod and sent to live in a refugee camp in Jenin. Through Amal, the bright granddaughter of the patriarch, we witness the stories of her brothers: one, a stolen boy who becomes an Israeli soldier; the other who in sacrificing everything for the Palestinian cause will become his enemy. Amal's own dramatic story threads its way through six decades of Palestinian-Israeli tension, eventually taking her into exile in Pensylvania in America. Amal's is a story of love and loss, of childhood, marriage and parenthood, and finally the need to share her history with her daughter, to preserve the greatest love she has.

Interweaves the stories of a baby girl in India, the American doctor who adopted her, and the Indian mother who gave her up in favor of a son, as two families- -one in India, the other in the United States- -are changed by the child that connects them.

"Set in Kuwait during the ominous years between the two Gulf wars, Small Kingdoms traces the intersecting lives of five people rich and poor, native and foreigner, Muslim, Christian, and non-believer when they discover that a teenaged Indian housemaid is being brutally abused by her employer. Tensions are high. Just miles away in Iraq, Saddam Hussein is threatening a second invasion of this tiny desert kingdom, which he destroyed six years before, in 1990. Even without a war on the horizon, rescuing a maid employed in a private home is a sticky matter in this rigid, class-conscious society, where the rich protect their own; and any intervention involves great personal risk. Emmanuella, an impoverished cook from India, risks losing her job and thus her ability to support her family back home. Kit, the young wife of an American businessman in the Gulf, could face grave damage to her marriage. Mufeeda, an upper class Kuwaiti woman, must buck the powerful status quo of her family and her class, as well as her own history. And there s Hanaan, a rebellious young Arab woman who may have as much to lose as the desperate maid. Having fallen in love with Theo, an American doctor working in the country, she has already faced violent retribution from her family. How much more violence lies ahead she doesn t know. Stubborn, charismatic, and dismissive of her society s strict codes of behavior for unmarried women, she will step forward to help the captive maid."

"Before following his father into battle, he had been like any other Kurdish boy: in love with his Maman, fascinated by birds and the rugged Zagros mountains, dutiful to his stern and powerful Baba. But after he becomes orphaned in a massacre by the armies of Iran's new Shah, Reza Pahlavi I. he is taken in by the very army that has killed his parents, re-named Reza Khourdi, and indoctrinated into the modern, seductive ways of the newly minted nation, careful to hide his Kurdish origins with every step. The Age of Orphans follows Reza on his meteoric rise in ranks, his marriage to a proud Tehrani woman and his eventual deployment, as Capitan, back to the Zagros Mountains and the ever-defiant Kurds. Here Reza is responsible for policing, and sometimes killing, his own people, and it is here that his carefully crafted persona begins to fissure and crack. -Publisher's website.

A haunting yet astonishingly hopeful story of a young Indian prostitute who uses writing and imagination to transcend her reality. An unforgettable, deeply affecting tribute to the powers of imagination and the resilience of childhood, THE BLUE NOTEBOOK tells the story of Batuk, a precocious 15-year-old girl from rural India who was sold into sexual slavery by her father when she was nine.

"As Zimbabwe breaks free of British colonial rule, young Lindiwe Bishop encounters violence at close hand when her white neighbour is murdered. But this is a domestic crime, apparently committed by the woman's stepson, Ian, although he is released from prison surprisingly quickly. Intrigued, Lindiwe strikes up a covert friendship with the mysterious boy next door, until he abruptly departs for South Africa. Years later, Ian returns to find Lindiwe has been hiding her own secret. -Publisher description.

For decades, Omar Yussef has taught history to the Muslim and Christian children of Bethlehem. He has managed to stay aloof from the violence swirling around him. Gradually, the Palestinian Christian minority has dwindled. Then George Saba, a favourite former pupil and a Christian, is arrested by the Palestinian authorities. He is charged with collaborating with the Israelis in the killing of a Palestinian guerrilla. The dead man's wife, also a former pupil, is found murdered next. George faces imminent execution; the mob is screaming for vengeance; the police want a scapegoat. But Omar cannot believe that George is guilty. Since no one else is willing to risk standing up to the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades gunmen, who hold the real power in Bethlehem, it falls to Omar to investigate. But will knowledge of the truth ensure that justice prevails?

Under the hot sun, the Jeddah streets resemble a scene from an old black and white movie: the women dressed like long, dark shadows and the men in their light cotton tunics. Naser's friends have all left town for cooler climes but he must stay behind and hold down his job at the local carwash. During his time off, he sits beneath his favourite palm tree, writing to his mother in Africa and yearning for the glamorous Egyptian actress he hopes to meet one day. It's hard to adjust to a world that puts up so many barriers between men and women: walls in the mosque, divider panels in the buses and veils on the street. Naser feels increasingly trapped, not least by the religious police who keep watch through the shaded windows of their government jeeps.

On assignment in Afghanistan with her partner, exuberant, larger-than-life Imo, to interview girls who have attempted suicide to avoid marriage to much older men, Maria, a rule-abiding photographer, is confronted by a difficult choice between journalistic success and her moral compass when she discovers that her job could endanger their subjects.

Winter, 1975: Afghanistan, a country on the verge of an internal coup. Twelve year old Amir is desperate to win the approval of his father, one of the richest merchants in Kabul. He's failed to do so through academia or brawn but the one area they connect is the annual kite fighting tournament.

"On a stifling day in 1975, the North Vietnamese army is poised to roll into Saigon. As the fall of the city begins, two lovers make their way through the streets to escape to a new life. Helen Adams, an American photojournalist, must take leave of a war she is addicted to and a devastated country she has come to love. Linh, the Vietnamese man who loves her, must grapple with his own conflicted loyalties of heart and homeland. As they race to leave, they play out a drama of devotion and betrayal that spins them back through twelve war-torn years, beginning in the splendor of Angkor Wat, with their mentor, larger-than-life war correspondent Sam Darrow, once Helen's infuriating love and fiercest competitor, and Linh's secret keeper, boss and truest friend. -Publisher.

Among the well-to-do families of Jeddah, Palestinian-born desert guide Nayir is an outsider. But when Nouf ash-Shrawi, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a wealthy Saudi dynasty, disappears just before her arranged marriage, Nayir is the man the Shrawis trust to bring her home. Days later Nouf's body is found in a desert wadi, but Nayir's task is not over; he feels compelled to uncover the disturbing circumstances surrounding her death. His search takes him far from his natural terrain and into the city of Jeddah, with its oppressive monuments, foreigners' compounds and shuttered apartments. Most troubling of all, his investigations force him to work closely with Katya Hijazi, a forensic scientist. He finds himself struggling with emotions he has fought all his life to repress and with loyalties he has never before questioned: to old friends, to his faith, and to a culture in which women take their secrets to their graves.

Forced to leave the university when the Americans invade Iraq, a young man from a small desert village heads for Baghdad to join the resistance, until a top secret mission forces him to reconcile a proposed terrorist act with his own moral principles.

"In 1868, on the barren shores of post-war Outer Banks North Carolina, the once wealthy Sinclair family moves for the summer to one of the first cottages on the ocean side of the resort village of Nags Head. Seventeen-year-old Abigail is beautiful, book-smart, but sheltered by her plantation life and hemmed-in by her emotionally distant family. To make good use of time, she is encouraged by her family to teach her father' s fishing guide, the good-natured but penniless Benjamin Whimble, how to read and write. And in a twist of fate unforeseen by anyone around them, there on the porch of the cottage, the two come to love each other deeply, and to understand each other in a way that no one else does. But when, against everything he claims to represent, Ben becomes entangled in Abby's father's Ku Klux Klan work, the terrible tragedy and surprising revelations that one hot Outer Banks night brings forth threaten to tear them apart forever. -Publisher description.

Based on an award-winning play by the same name, an evocative novel set in apartheid South Africa chronicles the abiding relationship that exists between two families--one black and one white--and two children born into the same household, in a saga that spans four generations and different African cultures.

Nyree and Cia O'Callohan live on a remote farm in the east of what was Rhodesia in the late 1970s. Beneath the dripping vines of the Vumba rainforest, and under the tutelage of their heretical grandfather, theirs is a seductive childhood laced with African paganism, mangled Catholicism and the lore of the Brothers Grimm. Their world extends as far as the big fence, erected to keep out the 'Terrs' whom their father is off fighting. The two girls know little beyond that until the arrival from the outside world of 'the bastard' their orphaned cousin Ronin, who is to poison their idyll for ever.

Balram Halwai is the White Tiger the smartest boy in his village. His family is too poor for him to afford for him to finish school and he has to work in a teashop, breaking coals and wiping tables. But Balram gets his break when a rich man hires him as a chauffeur, and takes him to live in Delhi.

Three women live on The Wonder House, a boat moored on Nagin lake and carved from the great cedars that watch over the Kashmir valley. A military coup over the border brings violence crashing back into the Valley. When an English journalist arrives to report on the conflict, he is invited to stay on The Wonder House. But Hal is a man adrift and his love for one of the women threatens more than just the fragile peace on the houseboat.