Humanities

In a malarial outpost in the South American rain forest, two misplaced gringos converge and clash. Martin Quarrier has come to convert the fearful and elusive Niaruna Indians to his brand of Christianity. Lewis Moon, a stateless mercenary who is himself part Indian, has come to kill them on behalf of the local commandante. Out of their struggle Peter Matthiessen has created an electrifying moral thriller, a novel of Conradian richness that explores both the varieties of spiritual experience and the politics of cultural genocide.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is an enchanting tale that captures the magic of reading and the wonder of romantic awakening. An immediate international bestseller, it tells the story of two hapless city boys exiled to a remote mountain village for re-education during China’s infamous Cultural Revolution. There the two friends meet the daughter of the local tailor and discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation. As they flirt with the seamstress and secretly devour these banned works, the two friends find transit from their grim surroundings to worlds they never imagined.

As a descendant of one of the American black freemen who founded Liberia, Helene Cooper grew up in a world of privilege and prestige among the "Congo" class. Helene lived with her parents, her sister Marlene --and a foster sister, Eunice, who would become Helene's best friend-- in a twenty-two room mansion by the sea. The Cooper daughters blissfully enjoyed the trappings of wealth and advantage claimed by the Liberian elite --until April 1980, when a coup left President Tolbert and his cabinet executed and the entire Congo class on the run. Helene, Marlene, and her mother fled Sugar Beach, and then Liberia, for America. Eunice, born to the Bassa tribe, was left behind.

From high school in Tennessee, to discovering her passion for journalism at the University of North Carolina, to a career reporting from everywhere except Africa as a foreign correspondent, Helene managed never to return to the trauma of Liberia, a country that had since descended into war-torn hell. But she couldn't forget the sister she had to leave behind. Finally, a near-death experience in Iraq told Helene that her homeland --and Eunice-- could wait no longer.

With unflinching honesty and a survivor's gentle humor, The House at Sugar Beach is at once a deeply personal memoir and an examination of a violent and stratified country. And, at its heart, it is a story of one brave woman's long voyage home.

In A Long Way Gone, Beah, now twenty-five years old, tells a riveting story: how at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he'd been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.

Three years before Che Guevara's fateful meeting with Fidel Castro in 1956, the 23-year-old medical student set out on his ancient Norton 500 motorbike on an eight-month voyage of discovery around Latin America. This diary tells the story of that trip in his own words.

The white tiger of this novel is Balram Halwai, a poor Indian villager whose great ambition leads him to the zenith of Indian business culture, the world of the Bangalore entrepreneur. On the occasion of the president of China’s impending trip to Bangalore, Balram writes a letter to him describing his transformation and his experience as driver and servant to a wealthy Indian family, which he thinks exemplifies the contradictions and complications of Indian society.