The Blind Assassin

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Jill Dawson

"London, 1922. Edith Thompson, an attractive, confident, financially independent 27-year-old woman, married during the Great War but soon finds her suburban life - and husband, Percy - stifling. Excited by the new freedoms available to women, dreaming of the kind of romantic and glamorous world she finds in novels and in films, she takes a lover, Frederick Bywaters, who is seven years her junior.". "Never in her wildest dreams could Edie have imagined the devastating end to her illicit romance: Bywaters, in a fit of jealousy, stabs Percy Thompson to death as he and his wife walk home one night from the theater. And in a sensational case that captures the imagination of an entire nation, Fred and Edie are summarily tried, convicted and hanged at the gallows - even as a petition to spare their lives receives more than one million signatures.". "Based on a true story, Fred & Edie is a dramatic novel of passion, murder and a spectacular public trial at a time of momentous change for women. Drawing on extensive research, poet and academic Jill Dawson creates a marvelously intimate, realistic and convincing account of a strangely ardent and compelling love affair."--BOOK JACKET.

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Julie Otsuka

Presents the stories of six Japanese mail-order brides whose new lives in early twentieth-century San Francisco are marked by backbreaking migrant work, cultural struggles, children who reject their heritage, and the prospect of wartime internment.

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Sunjeev Sahota

"A transfixing novel about two unforgettable characters seeking to free themselves--one from the expectations of women in early 20th century Punjab, and the other from the weight of life in the contemporary Indian diaspora. Mehar, a young bride in rural 1929 Punjab, is trying to discover the identity of her new husband. Married to three brothers in a single ceremony, she and her now-sisters spend their days hard at work in the family's "china room," sequestered from contact with the men--except when their domineering mother-in-law, Mai, summons them to a darkened chamber at night. Curious and strong willed, Mehar tries to piece together what Mai doesn't want her to know. From beneath her veil, she studies the sounds of the men's voices, the calluses on their fingers as she serves them tea. Soon she glimpses something that seems to confirm which of the brothers is her husband, and a series of events is set in motion that will put more than one life at risk. As the early stirrings of the Indian independence movement rise around her, Mehar must weigh her own desires against the reality--and danger--of her situation. Spiraling around Mehar's story is that of a young man who arrives at his uncle's house in Punjab in the summer of 1999, hoping to shake an addiction that has held him in its grip for more than two years. Growing up in small-town England as the son of an immigrant shopkeeper, his experiences of racism, violence, and estrangement from the culture of his birth led him to seek a dangerous form of escape. As he rides out his withdrawal at his family's ancestral home--an abandoned farmstead, its china room mysteriously locked and barred--he begins to knit himself back together, gathering strength for the journey home. Partly inspired by award-winning author Sunjeev Sahota's family history, China Room is at once a deft exploration of how systems of power circumscribe individual lives and a deeply moving portrait of the unconquerable human capacity to resist them. At once sweeping and intimate, lush and propulsive, it is a stunning achievement from a contemporary master"--

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Milan Kundera

L'Ignorance is a celebrated work by Milan Kundera (Jerusalem Prize), recognized for masterclass storytelling and lasting literary resonance.