Recommendations based on "Voice"

A rich, magical new novel on belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature and renewal, from the Booker shortlisted author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World.Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. In the taverna, hidden beneath garlands of garlic, chili peppers and creeping honeysuckle, Kostas and Defne grow in their forbidden love for each other. A fig tree stretches through a cavity in the roof, and this tree bears witness to their hushed, happy meetings and eventually, to their silent, surreptitious departures. The tree is there when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, and when the teenagers vanish. Decades later, Kostas returns. He is a botanist looking for native species, but really, he’s searching for lost love.Years later, a Ficus carica grows in the back garden of a house in London where Ada Kazantzakis lives. This tree is her only connection to an island she has never visited - her only connection to her family’s troubled history and her complex identity as she seeks to untangle years of secrets to find her place in the world.A moving, beautifully written and delicately constructed story of love, division, transcendence, history and eco-consciousness, The Island of Missing Trees is Elif Shafak’s best work yet.

- An Afghani `War And Peace' That Promises To Be One of 2007's Best Novels Khaled Hosseini's "A Thousand Splendid Suns" is a genuine instant literary classic, and one destined to be remembered as one of 2007's best novels. It should be compared favorably to such legendary Russian novels like "War and Peace" and "Doctor Zhivago".

Sweeping Across Centuries, And Stretching From Mesopotamia To London, This Is An Enchanting New Novel By Booker Prize Finalist Elif Shafak That Conjures A Trio Of Characters Living In The Shadow Of One Of The Greatest Epic Poems (the Epid Of Gilgamesh) Of All Time-- Provided By Publisher.

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Return comes a profoundly moving contemplation of the relationship between art and life.NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND EVENING STANDARDAfter finishing his powerful memoir The Return, Hisham Matar, seeking solace and pleasure, traveled to Siena, Italy. Always finding comfort and clarity in great art, Matar immersed himself in eight significant works from the Sienese School of painting, which flourished from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Artists he had admired throughout his life, including Duccio and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, evoke earlier engagements he’d had with works by Caravaggio and Poussin, and the personal experiences that surrounded those moments.Including beautiful full-color reproductions of the artworks, A Month in Siena is about what occurred between Matar, those paintings, and the city. That month would be an extraordinary period in the writer’s life: an exploration of how art can console and disturb in equal measure, as well as an intimate encounter with a city and its inhabitants. This is a gorgeous meditation on how centuries-old art can illuminate our own inner landscape—current relationships, long-lasting love, grief, intimacy, and solitude—and shed further light on the present world around us.Praise for A Month in Siena“As exquisitely structured as The Return, driven by desire, yearning, loss, illuminated by the kindness of strangers. A Month in Siena is a triumph.”—Peter Carey

“Sasson's candid, straightforward account...gives readers a glimpse of the cruelty and hardship endured by generations of Iraqis.”—Publishers WeeklyA member of one of the most distinguished and honored families in Iraq, Mayada grew up surrounded by wealth and royalty. But when Saddam Hussein’s regime took power, she was thrown into cell 52 in the infamous Baladiyat prison with seventeen other nameless, faceless women from all walks of life. To ease their suffering, these “shadow women” passed each day by sharing their life stories. Now, through Jean Sasson, Mayada is finally able to tell her story—and theirs—to the world.

A Dazzling And Intricate Tale From Elif Shafak, Booker-shortlisted Author Of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds In This Strange World 'there Were Six Of Us: The Master, The Apprentices And The White Elephant. We Built Everything Together...' Sixteenth Century Istanbul: A Stowaway Arrives In The City Bearing An Extraordinary Gift For The Sultan. The Boy Is Utterly Alone In A Foreign Land, With No Worldly Possessions To His Name Except Chota, A Rare White Elephant Destined For The Palace Menagerie. So Begins An Epic Adventure That Will See Young Jahan Rise From Lowly Origins To The Highest Ranks Of The Sultan's Court. Along The Way He Will Meet Deceitful Courtiers And False Friends, Gypsies, Animal Tamers, And The Beautiful, Mischievous Princess Mihrimah. He Will Journey On Chota's Back To The Furthest Corners Of The Sultan's Kingdom And Back Again. And One Day He Will Catch The Eye Of The Royal Architect, Sinan, A Chance Encounter Destined To Change Jahan's Fortunes Forever. Filled With All The Colour Of The Ottoman Empire, When Istanbul Was The Teeming Centre Of Civilisation, The Architect's Apprentice Is A Magical, Sweeping Tale Of One Boy And His Elephant Caught Up In A World Of Wonder And Danger. 'a Gorgeous Picture Of A City Teeming With Secrets, Intrigue And Romance' The Times 'shafak's Most Ambitious Novel Yet Her Best - Generous And Imaginative' Independent 'exuberant, Epic And Comic, Fantastical And Realistic . . . Like All Good Stories It Conveys Deeper Meanings About Human Experience' Financial Times 'fascinating. A Vigorous Evocation Of The Ottoman Empire At The Height Of Its Power' Sunday Times 'intricate, Multi-layered, Resplendent, Vividly Evoked, Beautifully Written' Observer 'sumptuous, Absorbing, Moving' Independent On Sunday

A teenager who wants to be a journalist in a suppressed society describes to his diary his daily life in his hometown of Damascus, Syria

Mahmoud's passion for his wife Fereiba, a schoolteacher, is greater than any love she's ever known. But their happy, middle-class world—a life of education, work, and comfort—implodes when their country is engulfed in war, and the Taliban rises to power. Mahmoud, a civil engineer, becomes a target of the new fundamentalist regime and is murdered. Forced to flee Kabul with her three children, Fereiba has one hope to survive: she must find a way to cross Europe and reach her sister's family in England. With forged papers and help from kind strangers they meet along the way, Fereiba make a dangerous crossing into Iran under cover of darkness. Exhausted and brokenhearted but undefeated, Fereiba manages to smuggle them as far as Greece. But in a busy market square, their fate takes a frightening turn when her teenage son, Saleem, becomes separated from the rest of the family. Faced with an impossible choice, Fereiba pushes on with her daughter and baby, while Saleem falls into the shadowy underground network of undocumented Afghans who haunt the streets of Europe's capitals. Across the continent Fereiba and Saleem struggle to reunite, and ultimately find a place where they can begin to reconstruct their lives.

Sattareh Farman Farmaian, the daughter of a once-powerful and wealthy Iranian prince, was raised and educated in the 1920s and 1930s in a Persian harem compound, along with numerous mothers and more than 30 brothers and sisters. As a young woman, she broke with Muslim tradition and travelled to America, where she became the first Persian to study at the University of Southern California. Her new life in the West fired a vision to lift her own people out of backwardness and poverty, and she returned to Iran to found the Tehran School of Social Work. For more than 20 years, Sattareh and her students waged a war against poverty, disease and overcrowding, and then, soon after the collapse of the Shah's regime, she was forced to flee the country in fear of her life. In this account of her experiences, she provides an insider's view of Iran's journey through the 20th century and of the events which led up to, and followed, the Islamic revolution.

Introducing the luxurious limited edition Khaled Hosseini boxed set. Both bestselling novels are cloth-bound, numbered and signed by the author. In Hosseini's unforgettable debut novel, The Kite Runner, twelve-year-old Amir is desperate to win the local kite-fighting tournament and his loyal friend Hassan promises to help him. But neither of the boys can foresee what will happen to Hassan that afternoon, an event that is to shatter their lives. After the Russians invade and the family is forced to flee to America, Amir realises that one day he must return to an Afghanistan under Taliban rule to find the one thing that his new world cannot grant him: redemption. In his second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Hosseini begins his story with Mariam, who is only fifteen when she is sent to Kabul to marry Rasheed. Nearly two decades later, a friendship grows between Mariam and a local teenager, Laila, as strong as the ties between mother and daughter. When the Taliban take over, life becomes a desperate struggle against starvation, brutality and fear. Yet love can move a person to act in unexpected ways, and lead them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with a startling heroism.