Set in 1930s Calcutta, this is a roman á clef of remarkable intimacy. Originally published in Romanian in 1933, this semiautobiographical novel by the world-renowned scholar Mircea Eliade details the passionate awakenings of Alain, an ambitious young French engineer flush with colonial pride and prejudice and full of a European fascination with the mysterious subcontinent.

Offered the hospitality of a senior Indian colleague, Alain grasps at the chance to discover the authentic India firsthand. He soon finds himself enchanted by his host's daughter, the lovely and inscrutable Maitreyi, a precocious young poet and former student of Tagore. What follows is a charming, tentative flirtation that soon, against all the proprieties and precepts of Indian society, blossoms into a love affair both impossible and ultimately tragic.

This erotic passion plays itself out in Alain's thoughts long after its bitter conclusion. In hindsight, he sets down the story, quoting from the diaries of his disordered days, and trying to make sense of the sad affair. A vibrantly poetic love story, Bengal Nights is also a cruel account of the wreckage left in the wake of a young man's self-discovery. At once horrifying and deeply moving, Eliade's story repeats the patterns of European engagement with India even as it exposes and condemns them.

واحة الغروب هي رواية تأخذنا إلى نهايات القرن التاسع عشر، وبداية الاحتلال البريطاني لمصر. يعود بهاء طاهر في روايته الجديدة والبديعة إلى هذه الفترة الزمنية المليئة بالأحداث.

تدور أحداث الرواية حول ضابط البوليس المصري محمود عبدالظاهر، الذي كان يعيش حياة لاهية بين الحانات وبنات الليل، ويُرسل إلى واحة سيوة لشك السلطات في تعاطفه مع الأفكار الثورية لجمال الدين الأفغاني وأحمد عرابي. يصطحب معه زوجته الأيرلندية كاثرين، الشغوفة بالآثار، والتي تبحث عن مقبرة الإسكندر الأكبر.

ينغمس كلاهما في عالم جديد شديد الثراء والخصوصية يجبرهما وأهل الواحة على مواجهة أنفسهم في زمن اختلطت فيه الانتهازية والخيانة والرغبة بالحب والبطولة.

تعكس الرواية مزجًا إبداعيًا بين الماضي والحاضر، والموضوعي والتاريخ والواقع، حيث تعبر عن هموم الوطن وتقدم تجربة العلاقة بين الشرق والغرب على المستويين الإنساني والحضاري بما فيها من صراع وتوافق.

Francis Chisholm is a compassionate and humble priest whose individuality and directness make him unpopular with other clergy. Considered a failure by his superiors, he is sent to China to maintain a mission amid desperate poverty, civil war, plague, and the hostility of his superiors.

In the face of this constant danger and hardship, Father Chisholm finds the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Recognized as A. J. Cronin’s best novel, The Keys of the Kingdom is an enthralling, fast-moving, colorful tale of a deeply spiritual man called to do good in an imperfect world.

In Waiting, PEN/Hemingway Award-winning author Ha Jin draws on his intimate knowledge of contemporary China to create a novel of unexpected richness and feeling. This is the story of Lin Kong, a man living in two worlds, struggling with the conflicting claims of two utterly different women as he moves through the political minefields of a society designed to regulate his every move and stifle the promptings of his innermost heart.

For more than seventeen years, this devoted and ambitious doctor has been in love with an educated, clever, modern woman, Manna Wu. But back in the traditional world of his home village lives the wife his family chose for him when he was young—a humble and touchingly loyal woman, whom he visits in order to ask, again and again, for a divorce. In a culture in which the ancient ties of tradition and family still hold sway and where adultery discovered by the Party can ruin lives forever, Lin's passionate love is stretched ever more taut by the passing years. Every summer, his compliant wife agrees to a divorce but then backs out. This time, Lin promises, will be different.

Tracing these lives through their summer of decision and beyond, Ha Jin vividly conjures the texture of daily life in a place where the demands of human longing must contend with the weight of centuries of custom. Waiting charms and startles us with its depiction of a China that remains hidden to Western eyes even as it moves us with its piercing vision of the universal complications of love.

Shanghai Baby is a story of love, sex, and self-discovery that was banned in China for its sensual nature and irreverent style. This novel is the semi-autobiographical tale of Coco, a cafe waitress filled with enthusiasm and impatience for life.

She meets Tian Tian, a young man for whom she feels tenderness and love, but he is reclusive, impotent, and increasingly using drugs. Despite parental objections, Coco moves in with him, leaves her job, and throws herself into her writing.

Shortly afterwards, she meets Mark, a married Westerner. The two are uncontrollably attracted and begin a highly charged, physical affair. Torn between her two lovers, and tormented by her deceit, her unfinished novel, and the conflicting feelings involved in love and betrayal, Coco begins to find out who she really is.

This beautifully written novel with a distinct voice describes China on the brink of its own social and sexual revolution.

On her fortieth birthday, Madame Wu carries out a decision she has been planning for a long time: she tells her husband that after twenty-four years their physical life together is now over and she wishes him to take a second wife. The House of Wu, one of the oldest and most revered in China, is thrown into an uproar by her decision, but Madame Wu will not be dissuaded and arranges for a young country girl to come take her place in bed.

Elegant and detached, Madame Wu orchestrates this change as she manages everything in the extended household of more than sixty relatives and servants. Alone in her own quarters, she relishes her freedom and reads books she has never been allowed to touch. When her son begins English lessons, she listens, and is soon learning from the foreigner, a free-thinking priest named Brother Andre, who will change her life.

Few books raise so many questions about the nature and roles of men and women, about self-discipline and happiness.