Heterick Summer Book Bingo 2018

Tokyo, 1984. A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver's enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84--Q for question mark. Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled.

In a town outside of Istanbul, a master well digger and his young apprentice are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they work, they develop a filial bond neither has known before. But in town, the boy finds an irresistible diversion: the Red-Haired Woman, an alluring member of a traveling theater company. When in his distraction an accident befalls the well digger, the boy flees to Istanbul. Only years later will he discover whether he was responsible for his master's death and who the redheaded enchantress was.

Widely regarded as one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the adventures of the self-created knight-errant Don Quixote of La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain.

A game of human chess is staged every ten years in an ancient Mediterranean city; the teams are visitors vs. locals. In this book, brief scenes from the game--and the relationship between the narrator and the Captain of the home team--are interleaved between strange, fable-like stories that are independent of the main narrative but, in curious and unpredictable ways, echo and double its chief themes.

In this powerful story Fariba Vafi gives readers a portrait of one woman's struggle to adapt to the complexity of life in modern Iran. The narrator, a housewife and young mother in Tehran, dwells upon her husband's desire to immigrate to Canada. When he finally slips away, she is forced to raise her children alone and care for her ailing mother. Haunted by the childhood memory of her father's death in the basement of her house, the narrator must confront her paralyzing guilt and establish her independence.

The Brothers Karamasov is a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and an exploration of erotic rivalry in a series of triangular love affairs involving the "wicked and sentimental" Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his three sons--the impulsive and sensual Dmitri; the coldly rational Ivan; and the healthy, red-cheeked young novice Alyosha. Through the gripping events of their story, Dostoevsky portrays the whole of Russian life in what was both the golden age and a tragic turning point in Russian culture.

The four interlocking narratives that make up this extraordinary novel belong to four women who live in the same apartment building in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war. As the war continues each day, unending, divisions between past and present begin to break down. Younes's intimate, haunting attention to these women's lives creates an unforgettable portrait not only of her characters but of the nature of war. Here, loss is the city's most constant resident and its story will inevitably overcome all the rest.

Full of philosophical puzzles and supernatural surprises, these stories contain some of Borges's most fully realized human characters. With uncanny insight he takes us inside the minds of an unrepentant Nazi, an imprisoned Mayan priest, fanatical Christian theologians, a woman plotting vengeance on her father's "killer," and a man awaiting his assassin in a Buenos Aires guest house.

From the sugar plantations of Saint-Domingue to the lavish parlors of New Orleans at the turn of the 19th century, the latest novel from New York Times bestselling author Isabel Allende tells the story of a mulatta woman, a slave and concubine, determined to take control of her own destiny.

Nineteenth-century Europe abounds with the ghastly and the mysterious. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian republicans strangle priests with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate Black Masses at night. Every nation has its own secret service. Conspiracies rule history. Europe is in tumult and everyone needs a scapegoat. But what if, behind all of these conspiracies, both real and imagined, lay one lone man? What if that evil genius created the world's most infamous document?

Set in the East German town of Altenburg after the fall of the Berlin Wall, "Simple Stories" deftly leaps among an array of confused characters caught in the crossroads of their country's history: a lovelorn waitress who falls for a visiting West German investor; an art historian turned traveling salesman; a former Communist official plagued by his past; an unsuccessful writer who asks his neighbor to break his leg so that he can continue to live on welfare.

Now in English for the first time, this major work of Haitian literature is a powerfully rendered response to life under an oppressive regime. Suppressed immediately upon publication in 1968 and finally released in France in 2005, this stunning trilogy is a scathing response to the powerful racial, sexual, and class struggles that rule Haiti. "Love, Anger, Madness" is an extraordinary, brave, and searing evocation of a country in turmoil.