Highways to a War by Christopher J. Koch (Minerva)

What leads people to that spot on earth that forever claims them? How are people drawn from one obscure corner of the world to another that absorbs them so completely that they become consumed by it? How do a time and a place intertwine to become so powerful that decades later they are still conjoined?

Saigon, Phnom Penh, 1965-1975-- two cities that flourished and floundered and fell in the same decade, and thirty years later, certain music and flavors and shades of light can bring these years and these places together again, dancing and dying in the memories of those who had been there.

Once upon a time, a boy from Tasmania came to Singapore with a camera, a tape recorder, enough money to live on for a month, and fell into Asia, its "wave of smells" and "sun which pours over him like a thick and scalding soup." He watched it all through his camera, he began to starve, his money dwindled. Sick and delirious, he was inexplicably rescued by a man obsessed with history and with a ravenous appetite for details from the present. "You'll show your appreciation eventually...," the boy was told, "There's a quid pro quo for everything in this life: haven't you noticed that yet?"

Given an opportunity, Mike Langford became a journalist who was legendary for his daring, his luck, and his love for Vietnam, where "laughter was like breathing" and where "youth casually vanished." Through Hardwick, his mysterious benefactor, Langford met Madame Phan, half-French, half-Vietnamese, who introduced him to a commander of the ARVN, the Army of South Vietnam, in the Mekong Delta. The company was in a region called the Cradle, and it was there that Langford began "a life that would last for a decade, and die with the war."

Other journalists stuck with American troops, "eating ice cream in the field and flying back to Saigon for a shower and a change in the evening", but Langford, from his first patrol, became one with the ARVN. He showed the world the faces of Vietnamese troops on the front lines, how they fought and how they died, until the commander of the company he photographed was killed by American "friendly fire" and Langford moved on to Phnom Penh.

A city "of charmed peace" "which no longer exists, which will never exist again," Phnom Penh attracted journalists "like a whole mislaid life" that was both exotic and familiar. The war lay beyond, down the highways, and photographers and reporters traveled to it in taxis--or in Langford's air-conditioned Mercedes. The battles were removed but real and children- turned -soldiers died in them. Beyond the highways, American B-52s dropped thirty-seven tons of bombs in a single year, destroying villages and sending rural Cambodians to the ranks of the Khmer Rouge.

As the war drew closer to the Cambodian capital, Langford drew closer to the war, as he fell in love first with Phnom Penh, then with its inhabitants, and then with a Khmer journalist whose fierce love for her country fed Langford's own passion for it. "He's losing his professionalism," a colleague said, "He's picking up the gun."

What happens to a man when a country that he deeply loves falls, and the woman he loves is still within its borders? What happened to Mike Langford, and will anyone really know what he paid when the quid pro quo came due?

A novel that is steeped in research, with a number of titles cited in the introduction that could form the core of a Southeast Asian studies program, this is a book that recreates history while it creates unfading characters and a dazzling view of the countries that they inhabited, however briefly but fully. Find it, read it, keep it.

Evening Is the Whole Day by Preeta Samarasan (Houghton Mifflin)

If there is one thing that literature has taught us, from Anna Karenina to The Corrections, it's that unhappy families are as much alike as happy families are. But while happy families are bound together by congenial mealtimes, festive holidays, and shared affection, unhappy families are linked by lies, unspoken secrets, and every conceivable kind of abuse.

This is the familiar territory that forms the terrain of Preeta Samarasan's first novel. A marriage founders, the children learn that whatever love comes their way will have to come from each other, a grandmother dies, an accusation is made, and a scapegoat's life is destroyed. From the first page, the story is obscured by things untold, which seem both deeply sad and sadly ordinary when disclosed at the novel's end. Yet what raises this book above the usual dysfunctional drama, what makes it rich and textured and darkly funny, is its setting and its surrounding community.

The crowd of characters that fill these pages wouldn't be out of place in the works of Dickens, while the titles of the chapters pay clear homage to that master of English prose. And the author tells us, "It is obvious how sharply parts of this land must have reminded the old British rulers of their faraway country."

But the "grey mist, glowing green hills" and "the violent silver ropes" of rain are in Malaysia, and the people who give the story such dazzling life are Indian, Chinese, and Malay. Some of them are ghosts.

The lonely and brilliant baby of the family, six-year-old Aasha, is the only one who can see the spectres, but there are many things that only Aasha sees and only partially understands. Her adored older sister has abandoned her, in spite of all she has done to prevent this, in spite of the huge and terrible lie that she has told to keep Uma, and Uma's mysteriously removed love, at home with her. Slowly and gradually, as bits and pieces of family history fall into place, it becomes plain why Aasha's heart has "cracked and cried out in protest."

As the jigsaw of tragedy comes together, so do unforgettable, wildly original characters, who would be minor if they weren't so indelibly drawn. Kooky Rooky, the neighboring kept woman, whose origins change each time she chooses to divulge them; Mrs. Surgeon Daisy Jeganathan, the social-climbing gossip with the "late-night, bridge-party laugh"; the dimwitted Anand who "cannot quite count to twenty" but is possessed by the spirit of his dead five-year-old sister once a year and becomes a celebrity prophet who speaks in a child's voice. None of these people are likable, yet they are instantly real and weirdly lovable.

The most real and the most lovable entity is Malaysia. An avowed wanderer and expat, Preeta Samarasan evokes her homeland vividly--its odors, its streetfood, its sun "liquid as an egg yolk", its "bloody ballet" of history, its "flourishing, mixed-up, polyglot" character shaped by its various ethnicities--and without it, this book would verge upon soap-opera territory. With it, it verges on a book that Charles Dickens would envy.

The Year of Living Dangerously by Christopher J. Koch (Vintage)

There are some novels that haunt you with a single paragraph, a few well-chosen words.

As our world appears more and more unstable and unpredictable, statements of fact carry the same credibility as fortune cookies and entrails of chickens divulge as much as the pronouncements of experts. In these times, the following paragraph holds a special resonance.

"There is a definite point where a city, like a man, can be seen to have become insane...It's always difficult to believe that someone we know has crossed into that territory where no one from our side can reach him and from which messages crackle back that no longer make any sense...That's how it was with Sukarno's Jakarta..."

The Year of Living Dangerously was made into a movie that has become so iconic that its plot has been boiled down into the triangular relationship between Mel Gibson, Sigourney Weaver, and the eerily androgynous Linda Hunt. These three actors have so thoroughly claimed this novel that it is a shock to read it at last and find they are not its central characters. There is only one main character and that is the city of Jakarta, seen through the eyes of journalists who struggle to interpret it to a world that can barely find Indonesia on a map.

These are men who report what they see, hear, and have been told, retreating at the end of the day to an airconditioned hotel bar that they have claimed as their turf. A competitive and jangling community, they drink, tell stories, and cling to each other's company. Jakarta intrudes upon their little sanctuary only as far as they allow it to, and only one of them ventures far beyond it after work--Billy Kwan, the half-Chinese, half-Australian dwarf who searches for his home in the world.

A man of restless intellect, Kwan is an explorer of ideologies, of people, of places, a photographer whose images define his questions. A comic figure to his journalist colleagues, he recognizes a spirit similar to his own in a newly arrived reporter, Guy Hamilton, and offers to be Hamilton's eyes.

As Billy leads Hamilton into Jakarta, the city takes on details, but never a shape, much the same as the antagonistic policies of Indonesia's leader, Sukarno. Poverty and danger lie in Jakarta's shadows, as well as the strained tension that mounts with each of Sukarno's speeches. Confrontation is the prevailing theme, and as Sukarno becomes more and more impassioned and his enemies are found closer and closer to home, no one feels safe.

In a city filled with foreboding and menace, disaster seems to be the only possible outcome. Love dissolves into mistrust, friendship into betrayal, and why this is happening is as much a mystery as how it will all end. Physical descriptions pinned to a page with words are the only concrete truth, and those descriptions are where this novel soars.

Sukarno is deposed, half a million people are slaughtered, the journalists are sent to the next global hotspot, and Jakarta goes on living. The place that is evoked so tangibly by Christopher Koch remains, unconsumed by its year of insanity and uncertainty. Decades later, our twenty-first century world, caught in its own insane and unncertain epoch, perhaps can find comfort in Jakarta's survival.

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (Atlantic Books)

"These days, there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies."

Balram Halwai is a boy from a family of men with small bellies, who is singled out by a school inspector as a white tiger, "the creature that comes along only once in a generation." What is taken up as a jeer by his classmates becomes a cruel joke to Balram when he is forced to leave school to crawl around a teashop, cleaning up spots and spills--and listening.

This is Balram's gift. He listens, he absorbs, and then he acts. Learning that drivers are in high demand, he takes driving lessons and sets off for Delhi, where he quickly lies his way into a job driving for a man whom he comes to idolize. "Eight months later, I slit Mr. Ashok's throat."

This is the first forty pages of a novel that explodes into tiny fragments the myth that globalization means the world will be as one. Balram is not a John Lennon aficionado, and imagination is not a quality that intrudes upon his consciousness. His background music is Sting, Enya, Eminem, and if he has any belief in anything, it is in the power of observation and pragmatism.

This is why he tells his story. After hearing that the Premier of China is coming to visit Bangalore "to know the truth...to meet some Indian entrepreneurs and hear the story of their success from their own lips", Balram begins a long letter to Wen Jiabao to explain his own entrepreneurial success.

At first, his saga seems a triumph of black humor, the shaggy dog story of the unreliable narrator. His fate is as much cast in stone as it has been for any man spawned from what Balram terms "the Darkness." His devotion to Mr. Ashok is unwavering; his feeling that Ashok's Western education has changed his employer's feudal background to one that is guided by justice and integrity threatens to change his own cynicism. But upbringing and family history prove to be a strong force, Ashok becomes corrupted, and Balram puts a stranglehold on his moment of opportunity.

"Speak to me of civil war, I told Delhi.

I will, she said.

Speak to me of blood on the streets, I told Delhi.

I will, she said."

Asok achieves his dream by slitting one man's throat. He gains the luxury of writing his own story; it is not, as his father's was, "written on his body, in a sharp pen." His laughter is loud and bitter and pointed. His life, as he reveals it, is a prophecy for those who choose to listen and a sentence--perhaps--for everyone, whether they listen or not.

Myanmar Architecture: Cities of Gold by Ma Thanegi and photographs by Barry Broman (Marshall Cavendish)

What most of us know about Myanmar could be tattooed on the abdomen of a mosquito. When we try to learn more about the country, the books that most easily come to hand are either highly political, highly outdated, or highly unreadable.

Who would ever think that one of the best introductions to Myanmar, its culture, and its history would be found in a coffee table book, that genre which is usually very pretty, examined once for its remarkable photographs, and then is ignored until it's time to donate something to the next church rummage sale?

Myanmar Architecture: Cities of Gold does indeed have remarkable photography but the writing is what makes this book extraordinary. Ma Thanegi, author of the travel classic, Native Tourist, is a writer whose sentences sparkle with vitality and humor, and she uses that gift to make the history of her country more enticing to read than many novels are.

With forms of architecture serving as her structure, Thanegi leads readers through time, recreating the life of her country throughout its history, from its ancient and turbulent early kingdoms where temples were built and monarchies were elevated and toppled in bloodsoaked succession, into its imperial days of glory before the forces of Western imperialism barged in and took over, bringing with them their Victorian towers and turrets, dripping with gingerbread trim.

The lost civilization of Pyu that flourished for seven centuries and then vanished, leaving few traces of a people who were so devoutly Buddhist that they would not wear silk because "it involved taking of life"; Bagan, which, legend says, once held 4,446 temples, of which "today, ten centuries later, 2,230 remain"; Amarapure, where in 1795 a British envoy witnessed a daily two-hour procession of elephants, horses, servants carrying their masters' betel boxes that were made from gold, enlayed with gems, and, reported the envoy, were "no inconsiderable load for a man"; the Big Black House left from the days of the British occupation, which was made of teak and haunted by those who were massacred during the era of the British pirate, Samuel White--all are vividly described in sensuous details that are accentuated by Barry Broman's lush photography.<br

Most revealing of Myanmar culture is the chapter on Vernacular Architecture, which is where Thanegi discusses the rich traditions and customs that have guided her country through the centuries. Examining both secular and sacred buildings, she explains the reasons why homes were simple and temples were opulent, why homes were traditionally planned around trees and why houses of all social classes were raised above the surface of the earth. The home plans that she describes are still followed by some of her countrymen today, and the open veranda, the front wall made of folding doors, the smooth-planked floors, and the toilet placed at some distance from the main dwelling place sound so perfectly suited to tropical living that it seems absurd that all homes in Southeast Asia don't conform to that ideal.

For those who are curious about Myanmar, or for those who plan to go to that country and see it for themselves, this book is the ideal introduction--its size is its only flaw, making it an impractical traveling companion. But it does fulfill its original function quite well--in addition to its unexpected literary and historical value, it looks dazzling on a coffee table.

The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh (Riverhead Books)

Although it's commonly accepted that truth is stranger than fiction, passionate readers quickly learn that fiction provides truths that cannot be found in volumes of fact and nowhere is this more obvious than in fiction about war. Military history is usually written with impeccable research and superb scholarship, but to learn what war truly is, it's necessary to turn to All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, Landsman by Peter Charles Melman or A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali by Giles Courtemanche. These are all novels that convey what war is for the people within it, the visceral, stinking carnage and terror and waste of combatants and noncombatants alike.

Bookshelves bulge with military histories of the Vietnam War. They are books that contain numbers, statistics, reports, and background information, but they do not contain the war itself. For that, readers need to pick up Bao Ninh's slender and frequently overlooked novel, The Sorrow of War.

This is a book with emotional and literary weight that is belied by its slightly more than two hundred and fifty pages. Even the most voracious bibliovore will discover that reading it takes time. Entering a war is not easy and staying within it is at times unbearable, but while Bao Ninh quickly makes that apparent, his literary skill keeps his readers enmeshed in the horror that he depicts so well.

Kien is a survivor, one of the few soldiers from his battalion who has lived to see American troops leave his country in defeat. After fighting for the entire ten years that the United States brought its power to bear against Vietnam, he is ready to return to Hanoi and live the life he has dreamed of for the past decade. The girl he loves is waiting for him, he has a home to return to, the war has left him neither crippled nor mutilated. He, along with other returning soldiers, have "wildly passionate ideas of how they would launch into their new civilian peacetime lives."

But his girlfriend has changed in their ten years of separation, and Kien finds "there are no trumpets for the victorious soldiers, no drums, no music...The general population just didn't care about them." It's time to move on, the war is over-- but within Kien it is still terribly alive.

He is haunted by memories so vivid and so real that the only way to distance himself from them is to write them down, to pin them to a page and make them stories. They return to him in scenes of cinematic force, with no chronological order, and that is the way he tells about these experiences that come back to life and engulf him once more. He drinks, he writes, he remembers.

"Broken bodies, bodies blown apart, bodies vaporized," this has been Kien's landscape for ten years. He learns that disregarding death is the only way to survive war; now he has to learn to look, body by body, at the way he saw people die. And his readers look with him, in haunted jungles, in blood-soaked mud, in an encounter with a woman who must be killed, in the midst of bombing where " the air cracked like broken glass."

By the end of this book, the numbers cited by military histories have been given a dreadful resonance. During the ten years of Kien's war, five million Vietnamese soldiers were killed. Bao Ninh is one of ten survivors from a battalion of five hundred men.

In Laos and Siam by Marthe Bassene (White Lotus)

It's easy for us 21st century travelers to believe that the practice of adventure travel began with the creation of Lonely Planet, which encouraged anyone with a little extra cash to grab a backpack and a guidebook and set off on the road less traveled. Yet our modern adventures look rather pallid and tame when compared to the travels and travails of Marthe Bassene, a flower of the French colonial system in Vietnam, who went with her husband to visit Laos and Siam in 1909, a journey that at that time was a three-month excursion up the Mekong and into the jungle.

There were no roads, only the trails followed by trade caravans, and Mme. Bassene anticipates "difficulties...and some dangers." Crossing the rapids of the Mekong, with its whirlpools, submerged rocks, sandbars that could hold a vessel captive for months, and its gorges with "walls of rock eighty to a hundred meters high" was a daunting experience in a small steamboat, and one that passengers quickly learn to confront with sang-froid. ("Shut up," is the captain's response to Marthe Bassene's initial cry of fright.)

Her week-long trip from Laos into Siam is equally arduous, riding horseback along a mountainous, rocky trail through the jungle, soaked to the bone by rainstorms, and sapped by "the humid, tropical heat that knocks down all courage." Wearing her husband's clothes because her own are thoroughly saturated, riding barefoot because her shoes are dripping wet, Marthe dreams of sleeping on a bed with sheets, indoors, as she reposes on a camp bed near a bonfire that blazes all night to frighten away tigers.

Throughout her travels, Marthe's observations remain crisp and descriptive. The fragrance of Laos impresses her from her first day and follows her through the country, "a subtle and delicate perfume" that, she decides, "is simply the scent of Laos." Arriving in Vientiane, she finds traces of a ruined city that reminds her of Angkor Wat. Sacked by the Siamese in the previous century, the remains of the temples are shrouded by the roots of trees, covered by vines and brambles, and looted by Europeans as well as the Siamese conquerors. "The time is not far," Marthe observes, "when the Laotian gods will be everywhere, except in Laos."

In the kingdom of Luang-Prabang, she meets King Sisavong, a monarch with a French education and an "ironic smile", who tells her "that he often regrets having left Paris." His hospitality opens the city to Mme. Bassene, and allows her a comprehensive view of life in the palace and on the streets of Luang-Prabang. Visiting the markets, she reveals the beginning of globalization and its effects, as she discovers "poor-quality stuff...with English and German factory labels." Falling in love with the city, she decides it's "the refuge of the last dreamers."

When she arrives in Siam, Marthe finds herself a precursor of the bedraggled backpackers of the future, but as a Frenchwoman, she's well aware of the "distorted version of French elegance" that she presents. "My vagabond-like get-up," she remarks mournfully, "shamed me." As a Frenchwoman, she is also disconcerted by the independent, uncolonized Thai spirit; when forbidden to use a cabin on the upper deck of a boat because she is a woman, she threatens to complain to the governor of Phitsanuloke. "The governor governs the city, I govern my boat," she is decisively told by the Siamese captain, whom she characterizes as a "stubborn mule."

Given the imperial tenor of her time, and the length and difficulty of her journey, it's surprising that Marthe Bassene indulged in so little petulance and national chauvinism. It's equally surprising how easy travel has become in the past hundred years. In 2008, to replicate the trip that Marthe did in 1909 would be the height of masochism--if not completely impossible. But wouldn't it be fun--or at least interesting--to try?

Dream of a Thousand Lives by Karen Connelly (Seal Press)

When Karen Connelly was seventeen and entering her last year of high school, she was whisked from northern Canada to the north of Thailand as a Rotary exchange student. Plunged into total cultural immersion in the small farming community of Denchai, she is instantly faced with a new alphabet with over seventy characters, a five-toned language, and the difficulty of fitting her independent, privacy-loving, poet's spirit into a highly protective culture.

Blessed with humor, adaptability, and a compulsion to keep a journal about her new life, she has carefully chronicled a lovely account of the transformation that experiencing another country can bring.

She learns to live in a world in which solitude is an upsetting anomaly, where ghosts are an accepted part of the psychic landscape, and where the sight of her "own pale arms" in her dark bedroom becomes amazing to her. Without "the words for the questions," much of what she sees at the beginning of her Thai life are mysteries that await explanations. And after three months, she is in love with Thailand, knowing that the country that she can never own a part of "already owns part of me."

Her book is written in Thai time, with long, seamless expanses of quiet observation that are punctuated by small adventures and the joy of daily living. A trip to Bangkok plunges her into unexpected culture shock when she stays in the comfort of a typical Western home after living for months in rural simplicity. Back in Denchai, Karen is plunged into comic episodes: the day that she competes in a village beauty contest, the night that she is turned out of her bedroom to accommodate a pair of newlyweds, and the wildly exuberant holiday of Songkran, the Thai New Year, when the entire kingdom is drenched in riotously hurled cold water.

As she prepares to return to Canada, she mourns, "I should have been awake constantly. I should have learned more." But few visitors have been so awake in Thailand, and even fewer have shared the country as poetically and generously as Karen Connelly has.

Seven years after her year in Denchai, Karen became the youngest winner of Canada's prestigious Governor-General Award for Touch the Dragon, which was published in the United States under the title Dream of a Thousand Lives. Fifteen years after it was published, her book remains a beacon and a benchmark for those who live in Thailand and hope to explain a small portion of the country to people who have not yet had the opportunity to experience it for themselves.

To Vietnam With Love: A Travel Guide for the Connoisseur edited and with contributions by Kim Fay (ThingsAsian Press)

Travel guides are, beyond a doubt, fun to read, but most armchair travelers find they must augment their guides with travel literature to flesh out their imagined points of arrival. The bare bones of where to eat, where to stay, what to see are not enough to feed a fantasy. Dreams require descriptions and stories and photographs to nurture vague desires so they will grow into plans, obsessions, and, at last, into adventures.

Nourishment for dreams, as well as practical travel information, is exactly what To Vietnam With Love provides. Although editor Kim Fay modestly states that this book will never supplant the conventional, comprehensive guidebook and that "reading it is like having a conversation with a friend", the accompanying fact file for each short essay makes this book almost all that is needed for travelers once they have reached their destinations.

What makes it a unique resource is the very special information that it offers. Travelers, expatriates, and residents from birth divulge what makes Vietnam special for them, ranging from Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City to villages along the coast and in the highlands. Their favorite dishes and drinks, restaurants and food stalls, shops and markets, hotels and guest houses--these are what a reader would expect to find--but this book goes far beyond the expected.

For those travelers who want to venture into the daily life that hides behind the postcard landscape, there are essays about exploring Hanoi's alleys, dancing in a Dalat ballroom, eating mooncakes during the Mid-Autumn Festival, drinking homemade draft beer with the people who brew it, exploring coastal waters in a handmade bamboo coracle, and wandering though the autumn blossoms of Hanoi's fragrant milk flower trees.

Others who want to contribute to the country but are unsure of how to accomplish that will find a whole section of possibilities in the chapter entitled Paying It Forward. Where to work with children whose homes are on the streets, how to give time and supplies to orphanages, where to work as a volunteer, and where to shop, eat, and sleep in places where profits are used to support a variety of foundations and organizations (many of which are listed in this chapter) are only a few of the suggestions that this section supplies.

Because once a traveler has fallen in love with a country there is no such thing as too much information about it, a chapter called Resources for the Road recommends books, movies, websites, language learning materials, and cooking courses that will enlarge and enrich the curious reader's knowledge and understanding of Vietnam.

And, as the editor has promised, there are friends waiting within this book. It is impossible to read about people's most particular passions without feeling close to them in a very real way. Every reader will find her own favorites. For me, Todd Berliner won me over with his essay about Hanoi Cinematheque and Cafe, Emily Huckson enchanted me with her description of Hue's Phong Nha Caves, and Alice Driver made me long to chat with her about how she found a home amid the tourist attractions of Hoi An. These people have become my invisible and indelible friends, while Julie Fay Ashborn's photographs make me wish that I could have her as my constant travel companion.

Part of a series that was launched with To Asia With Love, and that will continue with other destinations, To Vietnam With Love is as much a pleasure to wander through as it will be to wander with.

Available at ThingsAsian Books

Red Dust: A Path Through China by Ma Jian (Anchor Books)

Ma Jian has the eyes of a camera, the voice of a poet, and the soul of Jack Kerouac. An artist, a writer, a heavy drinker, and a natural flouter of all authority, he was bound to be singled out as an unkempt,unwashed "hooligan" when Beijing launched the Campaign against Spiritual Pollution in the decade following the death of Mao.

After being held for three days by the Public Security Bureau, Ma is released by an officer who assures him, "If we want to, we can make you slowly disappear." Propelled by this threat, Ma throws some clothing, soap, a forged letter of introduction, and a copy of Leaves of Grass into a bag and, on the day after he turns thirty, sets off by train to the western edge of China. From here he begins to walk, the beginning of a journey that will take three years and encompass much of China.

His journey takes on the proportions of an epic, as he walks through legends and history and modern secrets. In Xian, the home of the terracotta warriors who guard China's first emperor, he sees the excavated burial grounds where 700,000 workers were reputedly buried alive after putting the finishing touches on their ruler's mausoleum. In the hills of southeastern China, he encounters the Yi people, a tribal minority who, during World War Two, had captured a downed American fighter pilot, enslaved him, and released him only after nine years of servitude. Caught and drenched by a rainstorm in the depths of the southern countryside, he takes shelter in a gated, unlocked building, which he discovers is the center of a sanitorium for lepers. Housed in a camp "that looks like a pretty mountain village," thirty patients survive on what can be grown by those who still have the use of their hands.

His observations are vivid snapshots: the small girl whose cold fingers look like "little red carrots"; the woman on a Tibetan bus who rummaged about in her voluminous cloak and pulled out some candy, a radio, and finally " a small, sticky baby; the owl that a friend who worked in a hospital removed from a laboratory jar and cooked for Ma's welcoming dinner, "the taste of formalin" still discernible beneath the sugar and soy sauce.

Echoes of this odyssey can be found in Ma Jian's fiction. His harrowing description of a sky burial in Red Dust appears almost verbatim in Stick Out Your Tongue, his collection of short stories about Tibet. Near the Burmese border, he meets a village shaman who was imprisoned for eighteen years, thereby completing missing the Cultural Revolution and the modernization of his community, who must have provided the seed for Ma's latest novel, Beijing Coma. And only a man who has sold scouring powder as a tooth cleanser to people who have a hazy idea of what toothpaste actually is could have written about the deleterious aspects of rural Chinese entrepreneurship in The Noodle Maker.

Ma Jian now lives in London with his companion and translator, Flora Drew. The story of his journey from China to England remains untold, but with any luck, will emerge someday soon as a companion volume to Red Dust.

The Road of Lost Innocence by Somaly Mam (Spiegel & Grau)

When Somaly Mam was told by a European Union representative in Phnom Penh that "there are no prostitutes in Cambodia," her response was blunt and immediate. "Madame," she told the representative, who had lived in Cambodia for "at least a year," "You're living in a world of air-conditioned hotels and offices. This isn't an air-conditioned country. Go outdoors and take a look around."

Nobody knew better than Somaly that the representative was misinformed. Not only was she the founder of an organization that helped women who worked in brothels in her own neighborhood, she had been sold into prostitution herself when she was sixteen.

Born shortly after Vietnam had toppled the regime of Pol Pot, Somaly was a toddler when her parents left her in a communal mountain village where she was nobody's child, "at home everywhere and nowhere." Sold into domestic servitude when she was ten, she was married in her early teens, widowed shortly thereafter, and then was bought by a brothel in Phnom Penh from the man who had owned her since she was a child.

For three years, Somaly was a slave, living in a world of filth, violence, and fear. It is difficult to read about her years as a prostitute; it must have been excruciating to write about them. That she survived them is a testimonial to her courage and her spirit.

Good fortune played a part in Somaly's survival as well. She met Pierre, a Khmer-speaking Frenchman who lived "like a Cambodian" and "of all the people I ever met," she says, "he was the only person who was attentive to me--not to my body but to me." They married and went to France, where Somaly learned that she could work "honest jobs" and "communicate directly...as an equal." After eighteen months when they returned to Cambodia, Somaly came back as a Khmer de France, assured, confident, and secure in her place in the world.

Her life was comfortable in her residential Phnom Penh neighborhood, but Somaly soon discovered that surrounding the homes and gardens were brothels, and the girls within them were so young that foreigners called the area "the street of little flowers." Pretending to be a health worker, Somaly took condoms to the brothels and took the girls to clinics for medical treatment. When she learned that there were children of ten and "sometimes younger still" serving as prostitutes, often badly hurt and sick from the drugs they were given, she, with her husband and his colleagues, decided to create a center that would house girls freed from prostitution, and provide them with vocational training.

First they housed a dozen girls, then twenty, then more than thirty. Money came from the European Union, UNICEF, and Spain's Prince of Asturias Prize. Police raids on brothels freed more and more prostitutes, and as their targets became larger and more powerful, Somaly and her family became the subject of death threats. Her oldest daughter was kidnapped by traffickers and was rescued shortly before being taken across the border between Cambodia and Thailand. Her marriage dissolved under the pressure of her work. And yet Somaly continues to provide safe places for girls and women who are captives of the sex trade--with centers in Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, and ambitions to go even farther afield in Southeast Asia.

This is an age when heroes are needed desperately. It is incredible and inspiring that this woman who was born into and survived a life of horror has exerted every talent and scrap of energy that she possesses to help other women survive too. Her book is a document of courage and persistence--read it, give it to others, and help wherever and however you can. (More information can be found at www.somaly.org)

Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper by Fuchsia Dunlop (Norton)

When the SARS epidemic became news in China, speculation claimed that the illness might be caused by eating civet cat. This theory was particularly disturbing to Fuchsia Dunlop, who only days before had feasted at a banquet where she had been served a claypot soup that had been proudly identified by her host as containing civet meat.

Less than ten years before, Fuchsia had been daunted by the prospect of eating preserved duck eggs in Hong Kong, on her introductory trip to Asia. A self-confessed "worrier" when she first went to China, she soon "realised that if you want a real encounter with another culture, you have to abandon your cocoon." As a woman who had been taught that it was bad manners to refuse food that was given to you, and who yearned to escape academia for a culinary life, Fuchsia came to China to research ethnic minorities and became seduced by Sichuan pepper instead.

As a student living in a province that is famous for its food, Fuchsia is delighted by the way that Sichuan's "dark pink, pimply" peppercorns make her mouth "dance and tingle." That unfamiliar and alluring sensation leads her to eat everything she can find in this cuisine that "makes the ordinary extraordinary." She falls in love with Sichuanese food, and her new passion leads her to a new career--learning everything she can about the food of China and presenting to the rest of the world through cookbooks.

And yet to learn the language of cookery, Fuchsia needs to learn not just how to speak Chinese, but how to live in China. With the "basic grammar of cuisine," comes the hard-won knowledge of how to behave, how to speak the different dialects of the provinces she lives in, and how to become "nonchalant about risk." She succeeds so well that this well brought-up English girl slurps, spits, and splutters strange sounds at the table, admitting that "inside me, there is someone who is no longer entirely English." She becomes a foreigner in her own country, while in China she is "all too often a big-nosed barbarian," one of those blessed and cursed people who "juggle cultures."

Because she is a juggler, Fuchsia does not write an ordinary book extolling the delights and horrors of eating in China. She knows too much to have her knowledge fail to permeate her pages--and has lived in China long enough that she doesn't present herself as an expert--but as someone who has observed while learning.

She sees the city of Chendu change from a quiet city of wooden houses and "labyrinths of lanes" to a city that is "futuristic in its gleaming ambition" and admires the "brazen confidence" of a country with the courage to remake itself. She recognizes the decadence of eating shark's fin while still savoring it in her mouth, and makes at least one of her readers long for the opportunity to eat a fried rabbit's head, "cleft in half and tossed in a wok with chili and spring onion." And she poses difficult questions to those who love to look at China as the world's most voracious consumer, pointing out that it is a country that is just "catching up with the greed of the rest of the world."

When she concludes with a vivid story of how she quite mindfully eats a caterpillar that she has inadvertently steamed, along with vegetables from her mother's garden in England, describing her qualms and its "insipid, watery taste," it's impossible to keep from remembering the first taste of escargot or a live oyster. Fuchsia Dunlop's gift is to unite the world of adventurous eaters by making them look at their various barbaric appetites and understand that while it's all a matter of taste, learning the tastes of other countries can break down barriers while eradicating boundaries. Bon appetit!

The Last Days of Old Beijing by Michael Meyer (Walker)

When Michael Meyer pieces together an eighteenth century map, commissioned by the Manchu emperor Quianlong to "record the outline of every building on every street" in China's capital city and that is printed today on 500 sheets of paper, the portion with his neighborhood alone fills his living room. It is also almost identical, he discovers, to the image captured by Google Earth's satellite, and on it is a house standing on the same spot as the house in which he lives.

Meyer lives on Red Bayberry and Bamboo Slanted Street,in a neighborhood of narrow lanes and low-built houses. Beijing was originally made up of neighborhoods like his, called hutong, a word that dates back to the days of Kublai Khan. His hutong is one of 114 found in Dazhalan, Beijing's oldest community. Dazhalan is the same size as Vatican City, but while the home of the Pope has a population of 557, Dazhalan has 57,000 residents, 1500 businesses, 7 temples, and 3,000 homes. It lies in the Old City of Beijing, "an area slightly larger than Manhattan...centered by the Forbidden City." Within this historic framework, the small residential universes of hutong are rapidly disappearing, being erased by the invisible--and universal-- bureaucratic entity that Meyer calls "The Hand."

The architectural wonders of modern-day Beijing are shown in breathtaking photographs in Vanity Fair and other upscale magazines, glorious buildings that make New York City look decidedly behind the times. The world's most noted architects are being used to turn a municipality that is larger than Connecticut into a city that will lead the world, while lesser known practitioners of architecture are designing high-rise suburban apartment buildings that will house those who are displaced by Beijing's new urbanity.

The hutong neighborhoods, such as the one that Meyer inhabits, are called "urban corners" or "villages in the city" by Beijing's city government, places with a "chaotic environment" that are fire hazards and potential breeding grounds for crime. They are horizontal neighborhoods that are being crowded out by the new vertical Object Buildings in what Beijing architect Zhang Yonghe calls "a City of Objects."

When Meyer describes his living conditions, it certainly seems that Beijing's urban planners have a point. His hutong home is two rooms in a crumbling courtyard house, in which the polished marble floor contrasts with the straw-and-mud walls, there is no inside plumbing, and electrical fuses are so easily blown that Meyer uses his refrigerator as a closet. His morning ablutions are performed under a cold-water faucet in the courtyard, and his first outing of the day is when he saunters to the men's latrine, which he says "is a route I have timed flat." The Big Power Bathhouse, a place where customers can drink a beer while they shower, or pay for the exfoliating services of an elderly gentleman who wields a mean scrubbing mitten, is Meyer's neighborhood hygiene center.

And yet while his living conditions are spartan, Meyer lives in a human community that is functional beyond belief, when judged by Western standards. In his neighborhood he is known as Little Plumblossom, the teacher who volunteers at the hutong elementary school, which is a four story building surrounded by so many different kinds of trees that Meyer's students cannot count them all, "a sea of grey and green." There is one hutong rule that all residents abide by, "Public is public; private is private," and it is so strictly adhered to that Meyer's security is maintained by a simple padlock. His neighbors become his friends, particularly "The Widow," a fierce chainsmoking woman in her eighties, who feeds Meyer with food and conversation. She loves the hutong, because living in it keeps her "feet on the ground" and "connected to the earth's energy" which she would lose by living in a high-rise apartment.

This is the world that is threatened by Beijing's modern transformation. Narrow lanes that connect the lives of those who live in them are being displaced by streets that are as wide as highways and virtually uncrossable by pedestrians. High-rise apartment compounds far from the core of Beijing have no courtyards in which communities can develop. Over-crowding is being replaced by severe isolation, and people who have lived in spaces that are almost medieval are being tossed into modern living conditions in a way that guarantees severe culture shock. This is a story that only a hutong resident could tell, and Michael Meyer presents it, warts and history and humor and all, with the perspective of a man who bathed under a cold-water faucet every morning for two years.

The House on Dream Street by Dana Sachs (Seal Press)

It's easy to fall in love with a country--travelers do it all the time. It's far more difficult to extend that infatuation into a long-term relationship, as Dana Sachs discovers when she moves to Hanoi.

An independent American with a fledgling grasp of Vietnamese, Dana soon discovers that in her new home she has all the authority of a three-year-old child, coupled with the notoriety of Brittany Spears. Soon after her arrival she realizes "I would always stand out in a crowd--bigger, paler, and richer than everyone else." She is told about another American woman who had lived in Hanoi and was so besieged by attention that she retreated to her room and refused to leave until the day that she flew back to the States. Keeping this example in mind, Dana forces herself out into public view, learning to be comfortable within Hanoi's teeming streets and in the home of the family who rent her a room and slowly absorb her into their domestic scene.

She quickly learns key phrases, the most useful being "I don't know how to eat it." This, her Vietnamese friend, Tra, who has lived in America tells her, is a polite way to refuse unwanted food, and it rescues Dana from eating an egg that she thought was hardboiled but turns out to be a baby chick in embryo.

"You should try it. It's delicious," Tra tells Dana later, adding sympathetically that she had a similar experience in the States with mashed potatoes--"All that butter and cream--disgusting! How can people eat that?"

Learning the language helps build Dana's confidence and allows her to become closer to the family in whose house she lives. She enters a different time zone, spending hours sitting with her landlady Huong in a living room whose folding doors when opened exposed the entire room to the street. "It was hard," Dana remarks, "to know where the inside stopped and the outside world began." Sitting on a sofa that was almost on the sidewalk, Dana discovers how a public world can also be deeply personal, and how "relaxing" does not need to "involve some action verb." As they sit together Dana and Huong become friends and Dana becomes part of a small part of Hanoi.

Certain stereotypes persist. Dana continues to see Hanoi through a filter of past war stories, and many men of Hanoi continue to see her as an easy conquest, since she is of course American. A meeting with a man who claimed to have rescued John McCain when the downed pilot was floundering in Hanoi's Western Lake brings Dana to an unexpected affinity with Phai, a motorcycle mechanic, whose gentle kindness provides a restful sanctuary from an endless barrage of things to learn.

It's easy to fall in love with a man who in some ways personifies the country that she loves--it's far less easy, Dana discovers, to extend that infatuation into the same sort of long-term relationship that she has with Vietnam. And yet the attraction becomes a lasting friendship, as Vietnam becomes a second home, while changing over time as much as Dana and Phai do. The vivid and careful chronicling of Vietnam as it enters a new, peaceful, and prosperous century makes this book an important historical document as much as it is an engaging piece of travel literature that deserves to become a classic.

All the Wrong Places: Adrift in the Politics of the Pacific Rim by James Fenton (Atlantic Monthly Press)

"Horrible" is James Fenton's assessment of contemporary journalism, a discipline that prevents reporters from writing as though "they are present at the events they are describing. And not only present--alive, conscious, and with a point of view."

These are also prerequisites for being a poet, which Fenton is, so he is well-prepared to practice what he calls "something that predates journalism," the narrative form that is "reporting in its natural state."

Rather than the recital of facts that come from the mouths of journalists, Fenton is obsessed with the details that give depth and color to a narrative, and it is his gift for finding small, particular, idiosyncratic features that gives his reportage strength. When he is without these, as he is in the portion of this book that is set in Korea,he ventures into Fire in the Lake territory, about which he says, "the purpose of the book seemed to be to warn you off the subject." When he encounters the right people, as he does in the Philippines when he meets Helen, an American Meryl Streep look-alike who has become so immersed in her chosen home that she speaks English with a Filipino accent, he gets to the bones of his story. And when he writes about a part of the world that has claimed him, as Southeast Asia has, he is opinionated, at times thoroughly obnoxious, and absolutely unbeatable.

A man with a passion for Cambodia, Fenton went to Saigon a week after the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh, six days before the Americans left Vietnam. He had been to Vietnam before, where his English had been found wanting by a Viet Cong soldier when he had failed to respond to "How are you?" with the obligatory response "Fine thanks, and you?" He had been to a village on the border between Cambodia and Vietnam that was "a hypermarket of contraband" where every man, woman and child spent their time gambling,like "some allegorical town, say in the Pilgrim's Progress" while they waited for the Khmer Rouge to come and buy weapons. He had traveled through a village that had been destroyed by napalm, where he "noticed a pile of bananas that had been charred right through, although they preserved their original shape...like something discovered and preserved in Pompeii. The bodies had already been cleared away."

In Saigon as the city prepares for its fall, Fenton watches the appearance of the giant helicopters that complete the American evacuation as they darken the sky for hours, their noise "a fearful incentive to panic." The looting of the embassy begins as the last helicopters were landing on the roof and when Fenton enters the building he is greeted by "suspicious looks, so I began to do a little looting myself in order to show that I was entering into the spirit of the thing." When the liberating forces entered Saigon, their first view was of people laden with booty, which Fenton remarks, must have confirmed their belief in urban degeneracy.

Flagging down a tank with an NLF flag as it approaches the Presidential Palace, Fenton is hauled aboard and told to keep his head down. As the tank enters the palace gate and the immortality of history, its hitch-hiking poet observes "an extraordinary number of dragonflies in the air."

With the advent of peace the streets of Saigon became filled with the abandoned uniforms of the Saigon Army, "piles of clothes, boots, and weapons...so complete it looked as though their former occupant had simply melted into his boots;" stalls of looted goods whose chief customers, Fenton says, were the NLF, as well as the French residents of the city and journalists; billowing parachutes of various colors that sheltered impromptu cafes and "made the city utterly beautiful;" and the wives of military officers who took to the streets in protest when their husbands were sent away to reeducation camps where, rumor claimed, thousands had been killed.

If God is in the details, then James Fenton's writing must certainly qualify as some kind of sacred text. Read it and weep and pray that he may someday do this again.

Mosquito by Roma Tearne (HarperCollinsAustralia)

In the most terrible times of history, fairy tales are born. Princes marry fair damsels despite all obstacles in stories that are told and retold during times of plague, starvation, and never-ending war. When daily living is hopelessly, helplessly, and routinely endangered, stories emerge that keep the human spirit alive, and survive to become enduring literature, as the works of both the Brothers Grimm and Pramoedya Ananta Toer have done. In this same tradition comes a breathtaking and beautiful first novel from Sri Lankan artist and writer, Roma Tearne.

Theo, a middle-aged writer and widower, returns to his native Sri Lanka after decades of British life, during a time when civil war is driving others away from this country. He explains his return as a search for sunlight, but in truth Theo leaves safety for danger because he believes that he has nothing left to lose. He is a man without emotion, frozen by grief, searching for words.

Nalini is a girl who has learned to live a silent life. After watching her father burn to death on the street, leaving only black dust for his daughter to touch, Nalini has found that lines drawn on paper are more comforting than words. She draws and paints unceasingly and when Theo, as a local celebrity, comes to speak at her school, Nalini discovers that he is someone whose image she wants to put on paper.

Caught first by her tenacity, then her talent, and then her beauty, Theo begins to look for Nalini's presence in his life. Commissioning her to paint his portrait, he is amazed by the new life and youthful eagerness that Nalini gives to his painted image. Slowly an affinity develops between the seventeen-year-old artist and the forty-five-year-old writer, one that is carefully observed and understood by Theo's manservant, Sugi.

As he watches the silent girl, whose "unhappiness had blotted out her light," and the grief-stricken middle-aged man, both take on renewed life when they are together, Sugi is frightened by what he sees and they refuse to acknowledge. "They are both such children," Sugi realizes, "The girl is too young, and he is too innocent." In a country where the sounds of the night can presage death,Sugi knows that Theo and Nalini hear only what will enhance the new world that lies between them, and that it is up to him to protect them--if he can.

Surrounding the enchantment that envelops this unlikely couple are people slaughtered in road ambushes, child soldiers who kill without pity, and corpses who have died from torture and are found hanging from trees. Falling in love in a landscape of unspeakable beauty, in a country where peace is an illusive luxury, "a place spiralling into madness," Theo and Nalini are brutally and terribly separated when,inevitably, what Sugi fears comes to pass.

Fairy tales endure, not because of their happy endings, or because of their triumphs of good over evil, or their messages that true love will conquer all. The strength of a fairy tale is found in the exaltation of the strength of the human spirit and the agony that it can withstand. What a fairy tale provides is the realization that it is possible to be damaged and then healed, homeless and then secure, and that the power of story can keep hope alive. Perhaps more than ever, people need the message found in a fairy tale. In Mosquito Roma Tearne brings that message to a world that seems to be going back to a dreadful future.

Neon Tigers by Peter Bialobrzeski (Hatje Cantz)

There are some days when words just don't work their magic. Maybe it's a blockage caused by a bad cold or a week of thick and damp clouds or a small financial disaster--or maybe all three at one time. Or perhaps it's the depression caused by Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar followed by a 7.9 on the Richter scale earthquake in Sichuan. Whatever the cause, there's a sogginess of the mind as a result and even the most devoted print addict finds nothing appealing about any sentence on any page. It doesn't happen often, but when it does, it's a state that is very close to being in hell.

There are other ways to find diversions, a movie on dvd, music, a bottle of good Scotch, but for a biblioholic nothing is as satisfying as a comfortable chair and the weight of a book in hand. Yet sometimes when it comes to absorbing the content of printed words, "between the motion and the act falls the shadow" as that venerable bookworm T.S. Eliot memorably put it.

This is what big, expensive, glorious coffee-table books were invented for--the ones put on Christmas gift lists that are handed to affluent, generous relatives. They are the volumes that rest in splendor on the lowest shelf of the bookcase where their weight won't cause the entire structure to sag and crumble. They are the panaceas that should be kept with first aid kits and fire extinguishers under the label "for emergency use only." They are the books that we turn to when words fail us.

Richard and Mimi Farina once sang "Now in this age of confusion I have need for your company" and that is exactly the way I felt yesterday when I pulled Peter Bialobrzeski's Neon Tigers off the bookshelf and onto my lap. This man is a genius, an artist, and a magician who has taken a huge, unwieldy, outdated camera to Asia and has used it to transform urban landscapes that are often quite unlovely and unlovable into marvels of light and color and the stuff that dreams and fantasies are made of.

Bangkok's concrete gloom is wrapped in pink and violet light, the kind that envelops the city briefly before sunset and is captured to live forever in these pages. The playful geometry of a Mondrian painting lightens Singapore's grim efficiency, turning the city's buildings into patterns of delight and amazing beauty. Shanghai's canyons and pinnacles rival Manhattan's, taking on a grandeur that's usually found only in natural landscapes, while its elevated expressways float and curve and glitter like flying beasts of legend, hovering in a world of eternal l'heure bleu. The mass and power of Hongkong stands in stark contrast to its emerging rival, Shenzhen, which gleams with a newly-minted radiance and an alluring energy.

People are seldom seen. They appear quickly in a cluster of motorcycles on a Kuala Lumpur street, or as they wade in a park pool in that same city, with the greenery of their surroundings encircled by skyscrapers and construction cranes, or poised in fashionable affluence in a forest of Shanghai billboards. Humans are merely the extras in these pictures; buildings are the stars of a new world where the unnatural takes precedence over that which is natural This is,as Bialobrzeski says in a brief but eloquent essay, "a futuristic urban wonderland, where you feel you are part of a stage design for Blade Runner...which is incredibly fascinating and with all its contradictions makes you think."

This is what makes his work comforting in a time when there seems to be little comfort for many and when nature has turned upon those who have become its easy victims. What he admits can be seen as "the ultimate urban nightmare" is shown as the realized dream that these cities are, and the force of the natural world for an instant loses its frightening and destructive power. And suddenly, without words to intrude, we are able to take refuge for a moment in the magic of a pre-literate time, when fairy tales seemed as real to us as any other event that we were told of, and "ice-cream castles filled the air."

You can see some of Peter Bialorzeski's photographs for Neon Tigers at http://www.laurencemillergallery.com/bialobrzeski_exhibition.htm

The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng (Weinsten Books)

Philip Hutton, half Chinese, half British, is caught between two powerful cultures and two dynamic families while feeling as though he belongs to neither. Told by a fortuneteller that he "was born with the gift of rain," the element that exists in the space between sky and earth and carries with it both life and destruction, he knows that is his own natural state--caught in the middle without a place that is truly welcoming--until a Japanese stranger enters his life.

Endo-san is a master of the martial art of aikijutsu, and Philip becomes his student. The harmony and balance of the practice, with its discipline over both body and mind, begins to provide a bridge between the divergent halves of Philip's life,while the friendship and guidance of Endo-san give him the attention that he has never known that he has missed. Slowly the resolution between the mental and the physical that he has learned in aikjutsu begins to permeate other parts of Philip's life, and the disparate elements of his mingled heritage start to cohere for him. Then the war begins, the Japanese invade Malaysia, the British abandon the country, and the world as Philip knows it falls into pieces. With the realization that his family is endangered and that his closest friend is an integral part of the invading forces, Philip begins to make choices that brand him as a traitor, lead to the death of people he loves, and haunt him for the rest of his life.

If it simply offered a passport to a time that has disappeared and a glimpse of the horror and the heroism that are spawned by war, The Gift of Rain does this so well that it would still be an unforgettable piece of fiction. Yet that is only part of what this book does. The Malaysian island of Penang, a piece of the world that both Philip's British and Chinese families are rooted to, is given a central place in this novel and is described in such powerful, evocative detail that it claims the heart of the reader as completely as it does Philip's. From the mouthwatering array of food on its streets, to the amazing diversity of its neighborhoods, to the magnificence of its prewar houses, to the sound of rain dripping from its trees, it is generously and wonderfully given form throughout the book.

So are the complexities of love in its many guises, the mystery of looking at someone never seen before with complete recognition, the question of past lives, and the torment of free will with its attendant curse of choice. Memory and loss, age and acceptance, duty and longing, these threads in the fabric of Philip Hutton's life are examined with such intelligence and grace that they transform this novel without ever threatening to overwhelm its story. This is the mark of a writer to watch; this is The Gift of Rain.

The Latehomecomer by Kao Kalia Yang (Coffee House Press)

"What are you?" was a question frequently posed to Kao Kalia Yang when she was learning to talk. The answer, she quickly learned, wasn't "a name or a gender, it was a people."

"I am Hmong," she would reply.

Born in a Thai refugee camp, a child of two people who had met after fleeing to the Laos jungle when the Pathet Lao had deposed that country's monarchy, Kao and her family are in search of a home, as Hmong people have throughout history. From China to Laos, from fighting with Americans in Laos' "secret war" that accompanied the war in Vietnam to becoming the hunted prey of the victors that they had opposed, the Hmong once again found themselves on the move, carrying their history and culture within the minds of their people to a new country that would hold them and their shared identity.

For Kao and her family, the repository of history and culture is their grandmother, who is a shaman and a traditional healer. While in the refugee camps, Thai soldiers who guard the Hmong recognize her powers and come to her to cure their ailments, allowing her to go away from the confines of the camps and gather the plants that she uses in her remedies. She knows how to approach unseen worlds to call home the wandering spirits of living people who have been jarred too harshly by life. She is the one who holds ancient stories of the Hmong in her memory and teaches them to Kao and her sister.

After the family is sent to America, power within it shifts to those who are quickest to master English--except for the grandmother, who keeps her influence and her position as matriarch. In a strange country surrounded by a foreign language that she will never learn, she carries the knowledge of who her family is, and where they have come from.

When Kao becomes mysteriously ill, it is her grandmother's gift that saves her. "Grow beautiful in America," her grandmother tells her, and Kao obeys. As a student at the University of Minnesota, she begins to collect her grandmother's stories, while realizing that she will be the one who will carry the story of her grandmother's life--and death--to tell Hmong children who are born and grow up in America. She will be the one to carry her grandmother's own story, as well as the ones of people Kao never knew who lived and died in Asia, within her blood and bones.

It is not only Hmong children who benefit from this memoir. "I wanted the world to know how it was to be Hmong long ago, how it was to be Hmong in America, and how it was to die Hmong in America, because I knew our lives would not happen again." Through showing the world the life of her grandmother, Kao has revealed the life and history of a people, and all who read this book are richer for having received the gift of what she has written.

Ant Egg Soup by Natacha Du Pont De Bie (Sceptre Books)

If you believe that one of the main reasons to travel is to find new things to eat and if your favorite souvenirs are recipes from the countries you explore, then Natacha Du Pont De Bie is going to be your new best friend. She's the kind of woman who goes to a country simply because she's intrigued by its food, "a tourist with an inquisitive nature and an empty stomach."

Discovering that there was only one book in print written in English about the cuisine of Laos, she tracked it down, found the man who published it, Alan Davidson,and learned that he as the former British Ambassador to Laos had been given a collection of royal recipes by the Crown Prince, shortly before the monarchy was dissolved by the Pathet Lao. That was enough to send Natacha to Laos, and in 2000 off she went with her copy of Traditional Recipes of Laos, determined to meet people who would show her how different contemporary Lao cooking was from that which had been set before the King.

Arriving in Vientiane just in time for lunch, she throws herself on the mercy of the man who stamps her passport in the airport and is immediately taken to eat raw laap. This may not be the most conventional introduction to Lao food for the beginner but Natacha loves it, telling both the reasons why and how to make it in kitchens far from Laos.

There are far too few books about traveling and eating in Laos, and for that reason alone this book stands out. But to recommend it on those grounds alone would be unfair to Natacha. She's a traveler who wants to go everywhere, eat everything, talk with her mouth full, peer over shoulders in every kitchen--and then tell stories about it all. She's not averse to drinking too much Beer Lao, or even more disastrously lao-lao, but is up the next morning to see what's for breakfast (coffee, bananas, rice balls, baguettes, honey, chili sauce, sticky rice and home-made papaya jam greet her during her first Lao hangover.)

She's the kind of woman who's never met a market she didn't like, and her journey through Laos is studded with descriptions of markets and how to cook the food that's sold there. And she's clever enough to go with people who can show her food that won't be found outside of Laos' national borders--like a sliver of wood called sa-khan that's put in stews and tastes "faintly metallic with a mere trace of clove" which,she says,"made the inside of my mouth tingle and zing" and gives plain water the flavor of lemon. Ant eggs have a mild, nutty flavor that prompts her to call them the "caviar of Laos" and she tells how to cook them, if you can find them frozen or canned. Or better yet, just follow in Natacha's footsteps and eat them in Salavan on the edge of the Bolaven Plateau. I certainly plan to--and I'll probably be there in the company of my battered and travel-worn copy of Ant Egg Soup.