Tag Archives: Fiction

In My Hands Today…

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Other Waters – Eleni N. Gage

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Maya is an accomplished psychiatry resident with a supportive boyfriend, loving family, and bustling New York social life. When her grandmother dies in India, a family squabble over property ignites a curse that drifts across continents and threatens Maya’s life.

Or so her father says – Maya (being a modern woman, an American, and a doctor) doesn’t believe in curses, Brahman, or otherwise. But then a series of calamities befalls her family, her career and relationship both falter, and Maya starts to worry. She hopes a trip back to India with her best friend, Heidi, will enable her to remove the curse, save her family, and put her own life back in order.

Thus begins a journey into Maya’s parallel worlds – New York and an India filled with loving and annoying relatives, vivid colors, and superstitious customs she doesn’t, and does, believe in. But her time in India isn’t just a visit “home” or a chance to explore the strengthening and suffocating bonds of family, it’s also the beginning of a cathartic quest toward forging one identity out of two cultues as Maya learns unexpected lessons about life and love.

In My Hands Today…

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A Word for Love – Emily Robbins

It is said there are ninety-nine Arabic words for love. Bea, an American exchange student, has learned them all: in search of deep feeling, she travels to a Middle Eastern country known to hold the “The Astonishing Text,” an ancient, original manuscript of a famous Arabic love story that is said to move its best readers to tears.

But once in this foreign country, Bea finds that instead of intensely reading Arabic she is entwined in her host family’s complicated lives—as they lock the doors, and whisper anxiously about impending revolution. And suddenly, instead of the ancient love story she sought, it is her daily witness of a contemporary Romeo and Juliet-like romance—between a housemaid and policeman of different cultural and political backgrounds—that astonishes her, changes her and makes her weep.

But as the country drifts toward explosive unrest, Bea wonders how many secrets she can keep, and how long she can fight for a romance that does not belong to her. Ultimately, in a striking twist, Bea’s own story begins to mirror that of “The Astonishing Text” that drew her there in the first place—not in the role of one of the lovers, as she might once have imagined, but as the character who lives to tell the story long after the lovers have gone.

In My Hands Today…

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In the Country – Mia Alvar

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These nine globe-trotting, unforgettable stories from Mia Alvar, vividly give voice to the women and men of the Filipino diaspora. Here are exiles, emigrants, and wanderers uprooting their families from the Philippines to begin new lives in the Middle East, the United States, and elsewhere—and, sometimes, turning back again.

A pharmacist living in New York smuggles drugs to his ailing father in Manila, only to discover alarming truths about his family and his past. In Bahrain, a Filipina teacher drawn to a special pupil finds, to her surprise, that she is questioning her own marriage.

A college student leans on her brother, a labourer in Saudi Arabia, to support her writing ambitions, without realizing that his is the life truly made for fiction. And in the title story, a journalist and a nurse face an unspeakable trauma amidst the political turmoil of the Philippines in the 1970s and ’80s.

In My Hands Today…

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Sidney Sheldon’s The Silent Widow – Sidney Sheldon, Tilly Bagshawe

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A young American au pair, Charlotte Clancy, vanishes without a trace in Mexico City. The case is left cold, but its legacy will be devastating.

A decade later, LA is shaken by a spate of violent murders. Psychologist Nikki Roberts is the common link between the victims, her patients at the heart of this treacherous web. When someone makes an attempt on Nikki’s life, it’s clear she is a marked woman.

Nikki makes a living out of reading people, drawing out their secrets, but the key to this shocking pattern eludes her. With the police at a dead end Nikki drafts in Derek Williams, a PI who isn’t afraid to put his hand into the hornet’s nest. Williams was thwarted in the notorious Charlotte Clancy case all those years ago, but what he unearths in LA – and the mention of one name in particular – leaves him cold, and takes him on a dangerous path into the past.

A shadowy manipulator has brought his deadly game to the streets of LA. In a crime spanning generations, it seems Nikki Roberts knows all too much – and a ruthless killer knows the price of her silence.

In this crooked city, where enemies and friends are one and the same, Nikki must be the master of her own escape . . .

In My Hands Today…

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Selection Day – Aravind Adiga

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Manju is fourteen. He knows he is good at cricket – if not as good as his elder brother Radha. He knows that he fears and resents his domineering and cricket-obsessed father, admires his brilliantly talented brother and is fascinated by CSI and curious and interesting scientific facts. But there are many things, about himself and about the world, that he doesn’t know . . . Everyone around him, it seems, has a clear idea of who Manju should be, except Manju himself.

But when Manju begins to get to know Radha’s great rival, a boy as privileged and confident as Manju is not, everything in Manju’s world begins to change and he is faced by decisions that will challenge both his sense of self and of the world around him.