The Patience Stone by Atiq Rahimi

This slim book, winner of the Prix Goncourt, and translated from French by Polly McLean, is extraordinary on every level.  It is poetic, lyrical, moving, crude, tragic, sometimes funny in an earthy way, and absolutely engrossing. The plot is simple, the action confined to one room, the characters very few, …

BALZAC AND THE LITTLE CHINESE SEAMSTRESS by DAI SIJIE

This slim, charming novel about one of the darkest periods in recent Chinese history, the Cultural Revolution, manages to combine ugliness and brutishness with a life-saving thread of hope and young love and dreams. It is 1971, and 2 young men, teenaged sons of then-reviled intellectuals, are sent off to …