VPL - Books Just for You - Colonial Legacy, Immigration, and an Uncaring SocietyLike this list

12 items

• Human Acts

  a Novel

  Han, Kang, 1970-

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  AWARD WINNING. Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. In the wake of a viciously suppressed student uprising, a boy searches for his friend's corpse, a consciousness searches for its abandoned body, and a brutalised country searches for a voice. In a sequence…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Girl, Woman, Other

  Evaristo, Bernardine, 1959-

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  AWARD WINNING. Teeming with life and crackling with energy – a love song to modern Britain, to Black womanhood. Follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, Black, and British, they tell the stories of their…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Permafrost

  Baltasar, Eva

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  AWARD WINNING. The novel's no-nonsense lesbian narrator is an uninhibited lover, a no-hope employee, and a some-time suicidal student of her own dislocated self. As she tries to break out of the roles set for her by a controlling, overprotective…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Dominicana

  Cruz, Angie

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  AWARD WINNING. Fifteen-year-old Ana Canción never dreamed of moving to America the way the girls she grew up with in the Dominican countryside did. But when Juan Ruiz proposes and promises to take her to New York City, she has to say yes. It doesn't…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• America Is Not the Heart

  Castillo, Elaine

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  AWARD WINNING. How many lives fit in a lifetime? When Hero De Vera arrives in America – haunted by the political upheaval in the Philippines and disowned by her parents – she's already on her third. Her uncle gives her a fresh start in the Bay Area,…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Open City

  a Novel

  Cole, Teju

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  AWARD WINNING. Feeling adrift after ending a relationship, Julius, a young Nigerian doctor living in New York, takes long walks through the city while listening to the stories of fellow immigrants until a shattering truth is revealed.

• Infinite Country

  a Novel

  Engel, Patricia

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  AWARD WINNING. Talia is being held at a correctional facility for adolescent girls in the forested mountains of Colombia after committing an impulsive act of violence that may or may not have been warranted. She urgently needs to get out and get…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Vanishing Half

  Bennett, Brit

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  AWARD WINNING. The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern Black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Pachinko

  Lee, Min Jin

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  AWARD WINNING. In early 1900s Korea, Sunja is the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family. Her unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them all. Deserted by her lover, Sunja is saved when a young tubercular minister offers to marry and bring her…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• 1,000 Coils of Fear

  a Novel

  Wenzel, Olivia 1985-

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  A story about race, politics, feminism, motherhood, nationality and enduring love – about loneliness and finding joy in life within the roles that society assigns you. A young woman attends a play about the Berlin Wall coming down and is the only…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Of Women and Salt

  Garcia, Gabriela, 1984-

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  In present-day Miami, Jeanette is battling addiction. Daughter of Carmen, a Cuban immigrant, she is determined to learn more about her family history from her reticent mother and makes the snap decision to take in the daughter of a neighbor detained…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Lonely Londoners

  Selvon, Samuel

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  "In the hopeful aftermath of war, they flocked to the Mother Country – West Indians in search of a prosperous future in the 'glitter-city'. Instead, they have to face the harsh realities of living hand to mouth, of racism, of bone-chilling weather…Read moreRead more of this annotation