The Oracle
Summary
The husband-and-wife treasure-hunting team of Sam and Remi Fargo return in a new adventure as they search for an ancient scroll - which carries a deadly curse - in this thrilling addition to Clive Cussler's best-selling series. In AD 533, the last Vandal ruler in North Africa consults an oracle on how to defeat the invading Byzantine army. The oracle tells the king that a high priestess cast a curse upon the Vandal Kingdom after a sacred scroll was stolen. In order to lift the curse, the scroll must be returned to its rightful home. But the kingdom falls before the scroll is found, leaving its location a great mystery...until a current-day archaeological dig, funded by Sam and Remi Fargo, uncovers some vital clues. The search for the ancient scroll is put on hold when the Fargos learn that a shipment of supplies intended for their charitable foundation's school has been stolen, and they travel to Nigeria to deliver new supplies themselves. But their mission becomes infinitely more complicated when they run afoul of a band of robbers. The group takes Remi and several students hostage, and there are signs that the kidnapping is related to the missing scroll. The Fargos need all their skills to save the lives of the young girls at the school before they uncover the hidden treasure...and lift the deadly curse.
©2019 Clive Cussler (P)2019 Penguin Audio
The Rabbit Who Wants to Fall Asleep
Summary
This groundbreaking number-one best seller is sure to turn nightly bedtime battles into a loving and special end-of-day ritual. The child-tested, parent-approved story uses an innovative technique that brings a calm end to any child's day. This audiobook features two readings of The Rabbit Who Wants to Fall Asleep - one by Fred Sanders, one by Kathleen McInerney. Do you struggle with getting your child to fall asleep? Join parents all over the world who have embraced The Rabbit Who Wants to Fall Asleep as their new nightly routine. When Roger can't fall asleep, Mommy Rabbit takes him to see Uncle Yawn, who knows just want to do. Children will join Roger on his journey and be lulled to sleep alongside their new friend. Carl-Johan Forssén Ehrlin's simple story uses a unique and distinct language pattern that will help your child relax and fall asleep - at bedtime or naptime. You can choose which voice works best for your child. Both editions feature the same relaxing music throughout. The music is specially composed and uses carefully selected tones to reinforce the story. Reclaim bedtime today!
©2015 Carl-Johan Forssén Ehrlin (P)2015 Listening Library
Blind Eye
Summary
No one could believe the handsome young doctor might be a serial killer. Wherever he was hired - in Ohio, Illinois, New York, South Dakota - Michael Swango at first seemed the model physician. Then his patients began dying under suspicious circumstances. At once a gripping read and a hard-hitting look at the inner workings of the American medical system, Blind Eye describes a professional hierarchy in which doctors repeatedly accept the word of fellow physicians over that of nurses, hospital employees, and patients - even as horrible truths begin to emerge. With the prodigious investigative reporting that has defined his Pulitzer Prize-Âwinning career, James B. Stewart has tracked down survivors, relatives of victims, and shaken coworkers to unearth the evidence that may finally lead to Swango's conviction. Combining meticulous research with spellbinding prose, Stewart has written a shocking chronicle of a psychopathic doctor and of the medical establishment that chose to turn a blind eye on his criminal activities.
©1999 James B. Stewart (P)1999 Simon and Schuster, Inc.
Shanghai Girls
Summary
Number-one New York Times best-seller. âA gifted writer...explores the bonds of sisterhood while powerfully evoking the often nightmarish American immigrant experience.â (USA Today) In 1937, Shanghai is the Paris of Asia, a city of great wealth and glamour, the home of millionaires and beggars, gangsters and gamblers, patriots and revolutionaries, artists and warlords. Thanks to the financial security and material comforts provided by their fatherâs prosperous rickshaw business, 21-year-old Pearl Chin and her younger sister, May, are having the time of their lives. Though both sisters wave off authority and tradition, they couldnât be more different: Pearl is a dragon sign, strong and stubborn, while May is a true sheep, adorable and placid. Both are beautiful, modern, and carefree...until the day their father tells them he has gambled away their wealth and that in order to repay his debts, he must sell the girls as wives to suitors who have traveled from California to find Chinese brides. As Japanese bombs fall on their beloved city, Pearl and May set out on the journey of a lifetime, one that will take them through the Chinese countryside, in and out of the clutch of brutal soldiers, and across the Pacific to the shores of America. In Los Angeles, they begin a fresh chapter, trying to find love with the strangers they have married, brushing against the seduction of Hollywood, and striving to embrace American life even as they fight against discrimination, brave communist witch hunts, and find themselves hemmed in by Chinatownâs old ways and rules.  At its heart, Shanghai Girls is a story of sisters: Pearl and May are inseparable best friends who share hopes, dreams, and a deep connection, but like sisters everywhere, they also harbor petty jealousies and rivalries. They love each other, but each knows exactly where to drive the knife to hurt the other the most. Along the way, they face terrible sacrifices, make impossible choices, and confront a devastating, life-changing secret, but through it all the two heroines of this astounding new novel hold fast to who they are: Shanghai girls. Praise for Shanghai Girls: âA buoyant and lustrous paean to the bonds of sisterhood.â (Booklist) âA rich work...as compulsively readable as it is an enlightening journey.â (Denver Post)
©2009 Random House (P)2009 Random House
The Vegetarian
Summary
An irresistibly weird and sensuous story of betrayals, transformations and social taboos. Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people. He is an office worker with moderate ambitions and mild manners; she is an uninspired but dutiful wife. The acceptable flatline of their marriage is interrupted when Yeong-hye, seeking a more 'plantlike' existence, decides to become a vegetarian, prompted by grotesque recurring nightmares. In South Korea, where vegetarianism is almost unheard of and societal mores are strictly obeyed, Yeong-hye's decision is a shocking act of subversion. Her passive rebellion manifests in ever more bizarre and frightening forms, leading her bland husband to self-justified acts of sexual sadism. His cruelties drive her towards attempted suicide and hospitalisation. She unknowingly captivates her sister's husband, a video artist. She becomes the focus of his increasingly erotic and unhinged artworks while spiralling further and further into her fantasies of abandoning her fleshly prison and becoming - impossibly, ecstatically - a tree. Fraught, disturbing and beautiful, The Vegetarian is a novel about modern-day South Korea but also a novel about shame, desire and our faltering attempts to understand others, from one imprisoned body to another.
©2007 Han Kang. English translation copyright © Deborah Smith 2015 (P)2016 Random House Audio
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
Summary
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a brilliantly realistic journey back to an era of Chinese history that is as deeply moving as it is sorrowful. With the period detail and deep resonance of Memoirs of a Geisha, this lyrical and emotionally charged novel delves into one of the most mysterious of human relationships: female friendship. Lily is haunted by memories of who she once was, and of a person, long gone, who defined her existence. She has nothing but time now, as she recounts the tale of Snow Flower, and asks the gods for forgiveness.  In 19th-century China, when wives and daughters were foot-bound and lived in almost total seclusion, the women in one remote Hunan county developed their own secret code for communication: nu shu ("women's writing"). Some girls were paired with laotongs, "old sames", in emotional matches that lasted throughout their lives. They painted letters on fans, embroidered messages on handkerchiefs, and composed stories, thereby reaching out of their isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments. With the arrival of a silk fan on which Snow Flower has composed for Lily a poem of introduction in nu shu, their friendship is sealed and they become "old sames" at the tender age of seven. As the years pass, through famine and rebellion, they reflect upon their arranged marriages, loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. But when a misunderstanding arises, their lifelong friendship suddenly threatens to tear apart.
©2005 Lisa See (P)2005 Books on Tape Inc.
Stars Between the Sun and Moon
Summary
Born in 1970s North Korea, Lucia Jang grew up in a typical household - her parents worked in the factories, and the family scraped by on rations. Nightly she bowed to her photo of Kim Il-Sung. It was the beginning of a chaotic period with a decade-long famine.
Jang married an abusive man who sold their baby. She left him and went home to help her family by illegally crossing the river to China to trade goods. She was caught and imprisoned twice. After giving birth to a second child, which the government ordered to be killed, she escaped with him, fleeing under gunfire across the Chinese border. This demonstration of love and courage reflects the range of experiences many North Korean women have endured.
©2014 Lucia Jang and Susan McClelland (P)2015 Dreamscape Media, LLC
All You Can Ever Know
Summary
Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. From childhood, she heard the story of her adoption as a comforting, prepackaged myth. She believed that her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hope of giving her a better life, that forever feeling slightly out of place was her fate as a transracial adoptee. But as Nicole grew up - facing prejudice her adoptive family couldn't see, finding her identity as an Asian American and as a writer, becoming ever more curious about where she came from - she wondered if the story she'd been told was the whole truth. With the same warmth, candor, and startling insight that has made her a beloved voice, Nicole Chung tells of her search for the people who gave her up, which coincided with the birth of her own child. All You Can Ever Know is a profound, moving chronicle of surprising connections and the repercussions of unearthing painful family secrets - vital for anyone who has ever struggled to figure out where they belong.
©2018 Nicole Chung (P)2018 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
The Kinship of Secrets
Summary
In 1948, Najin and Calvin Cho, with their young daughter Miran, travel from South Korea to the United States in search of new opportunities. Wary of the challenges they know will face them, Najin and Calvin make the difficult decision to leave their other daughter, Inja, behind with their extended family; soon, they hope, they will return to her. But then war breaks out in Korea, and there is no end in sight to the separation. Miran grows up in prosperous American suburbia, under the shadow of the daughter left behind, as Inja grapples in her war-torn land with ties to a family she doesn't remember. Najin and Calvin desperately seek a reunion with Inja, but are the bonds of love strong enough to reconnect their family over distance, time, and war? And as deep family secrets are revealed, will everything they long for be upended? Told through the alternating perspectives of the distanced sisters, and inspired by a true story, The Kinship of Secrets explores the cruelty of war, the power of hope, and what it means to be a sister.
©2018 Eugenia Kim (P)2018 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon
Summary
This stunning fantasy inspired by Chinese folklore is a companion novel to Starry River of the Sky and the New York Times best-selling and National Book Award finalist When the Sea Turned to Silver. In the valley of Fruitless mountain, a young girl named Minli lives in a ramshackle hut with her parents. In the evenings, her father regales her with old folktales of the Jade Dragon and the Old Man on the Moon, who knows the answers to all of life's questions. Inspired by these stories, Minli sets off on an extraordinary journey to find the Old Man on the Moon to ask him how she can change her family's fortune. She encounters an assorted cast of characters and magical creatures along the way, including a dragon who accompanies her on her quest for the ultimate answer. Grace Lin, author of the beloved Year of the Dog and Year of the Rat, returns with a wondrous story of adventure, faith, and friendship. A fantasy crossed with Chinese folklore, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is a timeless story reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz and Kelly Barnhill's The Girl Who Drank the Moon. Once again, she has created a charming, engaging book for young listeners.
©2009 Grace Lin (P)2020 Hachette Audio
Underground
Summary
In this haunting work of journalistic investigation, Haruki Murakami tells the story of the horrific terrorist attack on Japanese soil that shook the entire world. On a clear spring day in 1995, five members of a religious cult unleashed poison gas on the Tokyo subway system. In attempt to discover why, Haruki Murakmi talks to the people who lived through the catastrophe, and in so doing lays bare the Japanese psyche. As he discerns the fundamental issues that led to the attack, Murakami paints a clear vision of an event that could occur anytime, anywhere.
©1997 Haruki Murakami (P)2013 Random House Audio
I Survived the Japanese Tsunami, 2011
Summary
During the heart-stopping events of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, one boy struggles to make it out alive. The I Survived series continues with a terrifying recent international disaster. Eleven-year-old Japanese American Owen has been in Japan for his sixth-grade year. By March he finally feels like he's getting the hang of the new culture, making friends at school, and feeling at home with the "weird" food. But early one morning, everything changes - and Owen suddenly finds himself just trying to survive one of history's most devastating disasters. Audio extra: includes author's notes read by Lauren Tarshis!
©2013 Lauren Tarshis (P)2016 Scholastic Inc.
After Dark
Summary
Here is a short, sleek novel of encounters, set in Tokyo during the witching hours between midnight and dawn, and every bit as gripping as Haruki Murakami's masterworks The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore. At its center are two sisters: Eri, a fashion model slumbering her way into oblivion, and Mari, a young student soon led from solitary reading at an anonymous Denny's toward people whose lives are radically different from her own: a jazz trombonist who claims they've met before, a burly female "love hotel" manager and her maid staff, and a Chinese prostitute savagely brutalized by a businessman. After Dark moves from mesmerizing drama to metaphysical speculation, interweaving time and space, as well as memory and perspective, into a seamless exploration of human agency. Murakami's trademark humor, psychological insight, and grasp of spirit and morality are here distilled with extraordinary, harmonious mastery.
©2004 Haruki Murakami. 2007 translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin (P)2007 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.
Peony in Love
Summary
"I finally understand what the poets have written. In spring, moved to passion; in autumn only regret." For young Peony, betrothed to a suitor she has never met, these lyrics from The Peony Pavilion mirror her own longings. In the garden of the Chen Family Villa, amid the scent of ginger, green tea, and jasmine, a small theatrical troupe is performing scenes from this epic opera, a live spectacle few females have ever seen. Like the heroine in the drama, Peony is the cloistered daughter of a wealthy family, trapped like a good-luck cricket in a bamboo-and-lacquer cage. Though raised to be obedient, Peony has dreams of her own. Peony's mother is against her daughter's attending the production: "Unmarried girls should not be seen in public". But Peony's father assures his wife that proprieties will be maintained, and that the women will watch the opera from behind a screen. Yet through its cracks, Peony catches sight of an elegant, handsome man with hair as black as a cave and is immediately overcome with emotion. So begins Peony's unforgettable journey of love and destiny, desire and sorrow as Lisa See's haunting novel, based on actual historical events, takes readers back to 17th-century China, after the Manchus seize power and the Ming dynasty is crushed. Steeped in traditions and ritual, this story brings to life another time and place, and even the intricate realm of the afterworld, with its protocols, pathways, and stages of existence, a vividly imagined place where one's soul is divided into three, ancestors offer guidance, misdeeds are punished, and hungry ghosts wander the earth. Immersed in the richness and magic of the Chinese vision of the afterlife, transcending even death, Peony in Love explores, beautifully, the many manifestations of love. Ultimately, Lisa See's new novel addresses universal themes: the bonds of friendship, the power of words, and the age-old desire of women to be heard.
©2007 Lisa See (P)2007 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.
The Walled City
Summary
There are three rules in the Walled City: Run fast. Trust no one. Always carry your knife. Right now, my life depends completely on the first. Run, run, run. Jin, Mei Yee, and Dai all live in the Walled City, a lawless labyrinth run by crime lords and overrun by street gangs. Teens there traffic drugs or work in brothels - or, like Jin, hide under the radar. But when Dai offers Jin a chance to find her lost sister, Mei Yee, she begins a breathtaking race against the clock to escape the Walled City itself.
©2014 Ryan Graudin (P)2014 Hachette Audio
What's Left of Me Is Yours
Summary
"Each chapter of this enrapturing novel is elegantly brief and charged with barely contained emotion." (New York Times Book Review) A gripping debut set in modern-day Tokyo and inspired by a true crime, for readers and listeners of Everything I Never Told You and The Perfect Nanny, What's Left of Me Is Yours charts a young woman's search for the truth about her mother's life - and her murder. In Japan, a covert industry has grown up around the wakaresaseya (literally "breaker-upper"), a person hired by one spouse to seduce the other in order to gain the advantage in divorce proceedings. When Sato hires Kaitaro, a wakaresaseya agent, to have an affair with his wife, Rina, he assumes it will be an easy case. But Sato has never truly understood Rina or her desires, and Kaitaro's job is to do exactly that - until he does it too well. While Rina remains ignorant of the circumstances that brought them together, she and Kaitaro fall in a desperate, singular love, setting in motion a series of violent acts that will forever haunt her daughter's life. Told from alternating points of view and across the breathtaking landscapes of Japan, Stephanie Scott exquisitely renders the affair and its intricate repercussions. As Rina's daughter, Sumiko, fills in the gaps of her mother's story and her own memory, Scott probes the thorny psychological and moral grounds of the actions we take in the name of love, asking where we draw the line between passion and possession.
©2020 Stephanie Scott (P)2020 Random House Audio
Please Look After Mom
Summary
A million-plus-copy best seller in Korea - a magnificent English-language debut poised to become an international sensation - this is the stunning, deeply moving story of a familyâs search for their mother, who goes missing one afternoon amid the crowds of the Seoul Station subway. Told through the piercing voices and urgent perspectives of a daughter, son, husband, and mother, Please Look After Mom is at once an authentic picture of contemporary life in Korea and a universal story of family love. You will never think of your mother the same way again after you listen to this book.Â
©2011 Kyung-Sook Shin (P)2011 Random House
World and Town
Summary
Sixty-eight-year-old Hattie Kong, descendant of Confucius, daughter of an American missionary, has lived to see both her husband and her best friend die back-to-back in a single year: âIt was like having twinsâ¦She got to book the same church with the same pianist for both funerals and did think she should have gotten some sort of twofer from the crematorium.â But two years later, itâs time for Hattie to start over. She moves to a small New England town where she is soon joined by a Cambodian American family and an ex-loverânow a retired neuroscientistâall of them looking for their own new lives. What Hattie makes of this situation and of the changing town of Riverlakeâchallenged as it is, in 2001, by fundamentalist Christians, struggling family farms, and unexpected immigrantsâlies at the center of a novel that asks deep and absorbing questions about religion, home, and what âworldsâ we make of the world. Moving, humorous, and broad-ranging, World and Town is rich in character and brilliantly evocative of its time and place. This is a masterful novel from one of our most admired writers.
©2010 Gish Jen (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
How I Became a North Korean
Summary
Yongju is an accomplished student from one of North Korea's most prominent families. Jangmi has had to fend for herself since childhood, most recently by smuggling goods across the border. Danny is a Chinese American teenager of North Korean descent whose quirks and precocious intelligence have long marked him as an outcast in his California high school. These three disparate lives converge when each of them travels to the region where China borders North Korea - Danny, to visit his mother, who is working as a missionary there, after a humiliating incident keeps him out of school; Yongju, to escape persecution after his father is killed at the hands of the Dear Leader himself; and Jangmi, to protect her unborn child. As they struggle to survive in a place where danger seems to close in on all sides, they come to form a kind of adopted family. But will Yongju, Jangmi, and Danny find their way to the better lives they risked everything for?
©2017 Krys Lee (P)2018 Dreamscape Media, LLC
Dreams of Joy
Summary
In her beloved New York Times best sellers Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Peony in Love, and, most recently, Shanghai Girls, Lisa See has brilliantly illuminated the potent bonds of mother love, romantic love, and love of country. Now, in her most powerful novel yet, she returns to these timeless themes, continuing the story of sisters Pearl and May from Shanghai Girls, and Pearlâs strong-willed 19-year-old daughter, Joy. Reeling from newly uncovered family secrets, and anger at her mother and aunt for keeping them from her, Joy runs away to Shanghai in early 1957 to find her birth fatherâthe artist Z.G. Li, with whom both May and Pearl were once in love. Dazzled by him, and blinded by idealism and defiance, Joy throws herself into the New Society of Red China, heedless of the dangers in the communist regime. Devastated by Joyâs flight and terrified for her safety, Pearl is determined to save her daughter, no matter the personal cost. From the crowded city to remote villages, Pearl confronts old demons and almost insurmountable challenges as she follows Joy, hoping for reconciliation. Yet even as Joyâs and Pearlâs separate journeys converge, one of the most tragic episodes in Chinaâs history threatens their very lives. Acclaimed for her richly drawn characters and vivid storytelling, Lisa See once again renders a family challenged by tragedy and time, yet ultimately united by the resilience of love.
©2011 Lisa See (P)2011 Random House
Red Oblivion
Summary
Two sisters follow a trail of pictures that caused their father to fall ill, but will they be able to piece together the clues without sacrificing their father's love?
©2019 Dreamscape Media, LLC (P)2019 Dreamscape Media, LLC
Without You, There Is No Us
Summary
A haunting memoir of teaching English to the sons of North Korea's ruling class during the last six months of Kim Jong-il's reign Every day, three times a day, the students march in two straight lines, singing praises to Kim Jong-il and North Korea: Without you, there is no motherland. Without you, there is no us. It is a chilling scene, but gradually Suki Kim, too, learns the tune and, without noticing, begins to hum it. It is 2011, and all universities in North Korea have been shut down for an entire year, the students sent to construction fields - except for the 270 students at the all-male Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), a walled compound where portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il look on impassively from the walls of every room, and where Suki has accepted a job teaching English. Over the next six months, she will eat three meals a day with her young charges and struggle to teach them to write, all under the watchful eye of the regime. Life at PUST is lonely and claustrophobic, especially for Suki, whose letters are read by censors and who must hide her notes and photographs not only from her minders but from her colleagues - evangelical Christian missionaries who don't know or choose to ignore that Suki doesn't share their faith. As the weeks pass, she is mystified by how easily her students lie, unnerved by their obedience to the regime. At the same time, they offer Suki tantalizing glimpses of their private selves - their boyish enthusiasm, their eagerness to please, the flashes of curiosity that have not yet been extinguished. She in turn begins to hint at the existence of a world beyond their own - at such exotic activities as surfing the Internet or traveling freely and, more dangerously, at electoral democracy and other ideas forbidden in a country where defectors risk torture and execution. But when Kim Jong-il dies, and the boys she has come to love appear devastated, she wonders whether the gulf between her world and theirs can ever be bridged.
©2014 Suki Kim (P)2014 Random House Audio
The Dragon Queen
Summary
From the bestselling author of Daughters of the Dragon comes the story of one of the most extraordinary queens in history. As tensions rise on the Korean peninsula, US diplomat Nate Simon is sent to Seoul to gauge the political situation and advise the president. He also needs to find out why someone sent the president an ancient, intricately carved comb with an ivory inlay of a two-headed dragon. Though familiar with Koreaâs language and culture, Nate knows little of its troubled history. Beautiful and mysterious embassy aide Anna Carlson believes itâs time he learns, starting with the extraordinary story of Koreaâs last queen. Seoul, 1866. The beautiful orphan Ja-young is chosen to be the child bride of Gojong, Koreaâs boy king. Highly intelligent but shy, Ja-young faces a choice: she can be a stone queen - silent and submissive - or she can be a dragon queen and oppose enemies and empires that try to rule Korea during the age of imperialism. Her choice leads her to forge a legend that will endure far beyond her lifetime. The more Nate discovers, the more he comes to realize that Queen Minâs story is still relevant today. Now the choice is up to him: be submissive and acceptingâ¦or change the world.
©2018 William Andrews (P)2017 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved
The Spirit of the Dragon
Summary
From the bestselling author of Daughters of the Dragon comes an epic novel of a star-crossed couple who must defy tradition, war, and prejudice to keep their love alive. At the urging of a Los Angeles detective, international rights lawyer Anna Carlson assists in a murder investigation. Itâs a personal request from Suk-bo Yi, a ninety-nine-year-old woman questioned in a mysterious death at a Koreatown nursing home. A stranger to Anna, Suk-bo has a tale to tell. For reasons of her own, sheâs chosen Anna - only Anna - to hear it... Suk-boâs story begins in 1937, when the Japanese occupying Korea force her to marry one of their own, named Hisashi. In spite of their differences, they fall madly in love, pitting them against two violently opposing cultures. When Hisashi joins the Japanese Imperial Army and disappears, Suk-bo embarks on a quest through years of war, bigotry, and poverty to find him. But Suk-boâs unfolding history reveals more than Anna can imagine: an heirloom comb bearing an intricately carved two-headed dragon binding her to Suk-boâs past. Soon Anna will discover her own legacy at the heart of Suk-boâs epic love story.
©2019 William Andrews (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
One Child
Summary
When Communist Party leaders adopted the one-child policy in 1980, they hoped curbing birthrates would help lift China's poorest and increase the country's global stature. But at what cost? Now, as China closes the book on the policy after more than three decades, it faces a population grown too old and too male, with a vastly diminished supply of young workers. Mei Fong has spent years documenting the policy's repercussions on every sector of Chinese society. In One Child, she explores its true human impact, traveling across China to meet the people who live with its consequences. Their stories reveal a dystopian reality: unauthorized second children ignored by the state, only children supporting aging parents and grandparents on their own, villages teeming with ineligible bachelors, and an ungoverned adoption market stretching across the globe. Fong tackles questions that have major implications for China's future: whether its "Little Emperor" cohort will make for an entitled or risk-averse generation; how China will manage to support itself when one in every four people is over 65 years old; and, above all, how much the one-child policy may end up hindering China's growth.
©2016 Mei Fong (P)2016 Tantor
The Commoner
Summary
It is 1959 when Haruko, a young woman of good family, marries the Crown Prince of Japan, the heir to the Chrysanthemum Throne. She is the first nonaristocratic woman to enter the mysterious, almost hermetically sealed, and longest-running monarchy in the world. Met with cruelty and suspicion by the Empress and her minions, Haruko is controlled at every turn. The only interest the court has in Haruko is her ability to produce an heir. After finally giving birth to a son, she suffers a nervous breakdown and loses her voice. However, determined not to be crushed by the imperial bureaucrats, Haruko perseveres. Thirty years later, now Empress herself, she plays a crucial role in persuading another young woman - a rising star in the foreign ministry - to accept the marriage proposal of her son, the Crown Prince. The consequences are tragic and dramatic. Told from Harukoâs perspective, meticulously researched, and superbly imagined, The Commoner is the mesmerizing, moving, and surprising story of a brutally rarefied and controlled existence at once hidden and exposed, and of a complex relationship between two isolated women who, despite being visible to all, are truly understood only by each other.Â
©2008 John Burnham Schwartz (P)2008 Books on Tape
Dragon Bones
Summary
When the body of an American archaeologist is found floating in the Yangzi River, Ministry of Public Security agent Liu Hulan and her husband, American attorney David Stark, are dispatched to Site 518 to investigate. As Hulan scrutinizes this deathâor is it a murder?âDavid, on behalf of the National Relics Bureau, tries to discover who has stolen from the site an artifact that may prove to the world Chinaâs claim that it is the oldest uninterrupted civilization on earth. This artifact is not only an object of great monetary value but one that is emblematic of the very soul of China. Everyoneâfrom the Chinese government, to a religious cult, to an unscrupulous American art collectorâwants this relic, and some, it seems, may be willing to kill to get it. At stake in this investigation is control of Chinaâs history and national pride, and even stability between China and the United States. The troubled Hulan must overcome her own fears of failure, while David tries desperately to break through the shell that has built up around his wife. As Hulan and David are enmeshed in international schemes for power and the turbulence of their own relationship, these hunters after the truth become the huntedâin a fast-driving narrative set against the backdrop of the building of the Three Gorges Dam, the largest and most expensive project China has undertaken since the Great Wall and the subject of great international debate. It is here, in the heart of the Three Gorges, that David and Hulan will battle their enemies and their own natures to see who will win Chinaâs dragon bones. Dragon Bones combines ancient myth with contemporary anxieties concerning religious fanaticism and terrorism to tell a story of love, betrayal, history, ecology, greedâand gory murder.
©2004 Lisa See (P)2010 Random House
The Interior
Summary
âSee paints a fascinating portrait of a complex and enigmatic society, in which nothing is ever quite as it appears, and of the people, peasant and aristocrat alike, who are bound by its subtle strictures.â (San Diego Union-Tribune)Â While David Stark is asked to open a law office in Beijing, his lover, detective Liu Hulan, receives an urgent message from an old friend imploring her to investigate the suspicious death of her daughter, who worked for a toy company about to be sold to Davidâs new client, Tartan Enterprises. Despite Davidâs protests, Hulan goes undercover at the toy factory in the rural village of Da Shui, deep in the heart of China. It is a place that forces Hulan to face a past she has long been running from. Once there, rather than finding answers to the girlâs death, Hulan unearths more questions, all of which point to possible crimes committed by Davidâs client. Suddenly, Hulan and David find themselves on opposing sides: One of them is trying to expose a company and unearth a killer, while the other is ethically bound to protect his client. As pressures mount and danger increases, Hulan and David uncover universal truths about good and evil, right and wrong - and the sometimes subtle lines that distinguish them. Praise for The Interior: â[See] illuminates tradition and change, Western and Eastern cultural differences.... All this in the middle of her thriller which is also about greed, corruption, abuse of the disadvantaged, the desperation of those on the bottom of the food chain, and love.â (The Tennessean) âSophisticated...graceful... Seeâs picture of contemporary Chinaâs relationship with the United States is aptly played out through her characters.â (Los Angeles Times) âImmediate, haunting and exquisitely rendered.â (San Francisco Chronicle)
©2010 Lisa See (P)2010 Random House