Explorations in Reading: Behind the Beautiful Forevers

As India starts to prosper, the residents of Annawadi are electric with hope. Abdul, an enterprising teenager, sees "a fortune beyond counting" in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Meanwhile Asha, a woman of formidable ambition, has identified a shadier route to the middle class. With a little luck, her beautiful daughter, Annawadi's "most-everything girl," might become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest children, like the young thief Kalu, feel themselves inching closer to their dreams. But then Abdul is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power, and economic envy turn brutal.
Setting: India

In the days leading up to the partition of India in 1947, thirteen-year-old Bilal devises an elaborate scheme to keep his dying father from hearing the news about the country's division.
Setting: India

Presents a novel based upon the life of the author about Lin, an escaped convict who disappears into the dark side of Bombay's streets and enters into a life of murder and betrayal, prison and torture, and war.
Setting: India

Set in an Ibo village in Nigeria, the novel recreates pre-Christian tribal life and shows how the coming of the white man led to the breaking up of the old ways.
Setting: Nigeria

When civil war came to Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, in January 1991, two-thirds of the city's population fled. Among them was eight-year-old Asad Abdullahi. His mother murdered by a militia, his father somewhere in hiding, he was swept alone into the great wartime migration that scattered the Somali people throughout sub-Saharan Africa and the world. This extraordinary book tells Asad's story.
Setting: Somalia

Balram Halwai is educated in the art of corruption when he is hired as the driver for the wealthiest man in his village in India, by witnessing his employers bribe and barter through his rear view mirror.
Setting: India

Three young men, and one unforgettable woman, come together in a journey from India to England, where they hope to begin something new -- to support their families; to build their fortunes; to show their worth; to escape the past. They have almost no idea what awaits them.
Setting: India and England.

The government of India in 1975 has just declared a State of Emergency, which, coupled with a housing shortage, compels four people to share an apartment. Their common need leads them to forge a lasting friendship that sees them through the bad times.
Setting: India

After winning India's biggest quiz show, Ram Mohammad Thomas is put in jail as authorities question how a poor orphan who has never gone to school could win such a contest.
Setting: India

City of Djinns peels back the layers of Delhi's centuries-old history, revealing an extraordinary array of characters along the way-from eunuchs to descendants of great Moguls.
Setting: India

Jan Wong, a Canadian of Chinese descent, went to China as a starry-eyed Maoist in 1972 at the height of the Cultural Revolution. A true believer--and one of only two Westerners permitted to enroll at Beijing University--her education included wielding a pneumatic drill at the Number One Machine Tool Factory. In the name of the Revolution, she renounced rock & roll, hauled pig manure in the paddy fields, and turned in a fellow student who sought her help in getting to the United States.
Setting: China

An assessment of how Haiti has fared after the 2010 earthquake, revealing how the country continues to suffer from poverty, illness, and a broken infrastructure, and assessing the factors that prevent aid from reaching people in need.
Setting: Haiti

Chronicles the lives of six North Koreans over a span of fifteen years, exploring how the lives of ordinary citizens were impacted by key social, political, and economic events of the time.
Setting: North Korea

The story of Saleem Sinal, born precisely at midnight, August 15, 1947, the moment India became independent. Saleem's life parallels the history of his nation.
Setting: India

Shy twelve-year-old Nisha, forced to flee her home with her Hindu family during the 1947 partition of India, tries to find her voice and make sense of the world falling apart around her by writing to her deceased Muslim mother in the pages of her diary.
Setting: India

Cidade de Deus: a place where the streets are awash with narcotics, where violence can erupt at any moment over drugs, money, and love--but also a place where the samba beat rocks till dawn, where the women are the most beautiful on earth, and where one young man wants to escape his background and become a photographer.
Setting: Brazil

Tells the uncommon love story between two uncommon people whose collaboration sparked a successful movement to transform the lives of vulnerable girls and the urban poor.
Setting: Kibera, Africa

The Corpse Walker introduces us to regular men and women at the bottom of Chinese society, most of whom have been battered by life but have managed to retain their dignity: a professional mourner, a human trafficker, a public toilet manager, a leper, a grave robber, and a Falung Gong practitioner, among others.
Setting: China

Eleven-year-old Gopal and his family leave their rural Indian village to live with his uncle in Mumbai, but when they arrive his father goes missing and Gopal ends up locked in a sweatshop from which there is no escape.
Setting: India

A Suitable Boy takes us into the richly imagined world of four large extended families and spins a compulsively readable tale of their lives and loves.
Setting: India

A novel of Beijing that paints a microcosm of contemporary China, dealing with classes at the two extremes: the super rich and the migrant workers who make them rich through deceit and corruption.
Setting: China

Born in a So Paulo shantytown, Ludo is rescued and raised by a plutocrat and finds himself entrenched in the gated, guarded community of the super-rich.
Setting: Brazil

The compelling story of a rare friendship between a young Peace Corps volunteer and a midwife who became a legend.
Setting: Mali, Africa