King

Sample

Min Jin Lee

In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations. Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters--strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis--survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.

Sample

Jeet Thayil

Shuklaji Street, in Old Bombay. In Rashid's opium room the air is thick and potent. A beautiful young woman leans to hold a long-stemmed pipe over a flame, her hair falling across her dark eyes. Around her, men sprawl and mutter in the gloom, each one drifting with his own tide. Here, people say that you introduce only your worst enemy to opium. Outside, stray dogs lope in packs. Street vendors hustle. Hookers call for custom through the bars of their cages as their pimps slouch in doorways in the half-light. There is an underworld whisper of a new terror: the Pathar Maar, the stone killer, whose victims are the nameless, invisible poor. There are too many of them to count in this broken city.

Sample

Clifford Jackman

Traces decades in the lives of a post-Civil War Oklahoma family that includes such members as a psychopathic killer, a group of cruel brothers, an impassive ex-slave, a dangerous child prodigy and a pathologically deviant patriarch. After their actions during the Civil War lead to a courtmartial, a group of hardened Union soldiers recasts themselves as outlaws, and find that the disorder of Reconstruction allows for all sort of savage freedom. The psychopathic killer Quentin Ross; the mean and moronic Empire brothers; the impassive ex-slave Fred Johnson; dangerous child prodigy Lukas Shakespeare-- but the malevolent center of this 'family' is their cold, hardened leader, Augustus Winter, a man with an almost pathological resistance to the rules of society and a preternatural gift for butchery.

Sample

Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children is a celebrated work by Salman Rushdie (Booker of Bookers Winner), recognized for masterclass storytelling and lasting literary resonance.