Anil's ghost
by Michael Ondaatje
In his Booker Prize-winning third novel, The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje explored the nature of love and betrayal in wartime. His fourth, Anil's Ghost, is also set during a war, but unlike in World War II, the enemy is difficult to identify in the bloody sectarian upheaval that ripped Sri Lanka apart in the 1980s and '90s. The protagonist, Anil Tissera, a native Sri Lankan, left her homeland at 18 and returns to it 15 years later only as part of an international human rights fact-finding mission. In the intervening years she has become a forensic anthropologist--a career that has landed her in the killing fields of Central America, digging up the victims of Guatemala's dirty war. Now she's come to Sri Lanka on a similar quest. But as she soon learns, there are fundamental differences between her previous assignment and this one.

Crescent
by Diana Abu-Jaber
Diana Abu-Jaber has written a haunting and fanciful story about an Iraqi community in Los Angeles. Sirine, who is half-Arab and a chef at a Lebanese restaurant, falls hopelessly in love with Han, an Iraqi exile and professor at a local university. Abu-Jaber captures the essence of the local color and distant culture as the two worlds collide, and Nike Doukas reads the parts perfectly, communicating the drama and uncertainty of new love. Abu-Jaber weaves into the novel a fanciful folktale of a mother's search for her wandering son, told by Sirine's uncle-turned-surrogate-father.

Earth and Ashes
by Atiq Rahimi
The devastation of Afghanistan during the Soviet war is succinctly and piercingly conveyed in Earth and Ashes by Atiq Rahimi (trans. from the Persian by Erdag M. Goknar), a novella-length account of an old man's futile journey. Dastaguir and his grandson Yassin wait beside a guard post on the road to the mine where Dastaguir's son Murad works. The family's village has been bombed, and everyone else in the family is dead; Yassin was deafened by the attack. While he waits for a ride to the mine, Dastaguir is visited by fantastic visions ("You find yourself standing on the branch of a jujube tree, stark naked"). The blasted dreamscape of Rahimi's story and his tightly controlled prose make this a sobering literary testament to the horrors of war.

House of Sand and Fog
by Andre Dubus III
Opportunity knocks for an Iranian immigrant in California when the county offers for sale a seized house at a bargain price. It will serve as a launching pad for his real-estate business. When the county discovers it made an error, the drug-addicted woman who owned the house demands its return, but the Iranian refuses. Unfortunately for him, the woman's lover is a policeman who takes the law into his hands.

The Mulberry Empire: or the Two Virtuous Journeys of the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan
by Philip Hensher
In the spring of 1839, some fifty thousand British forces entered Afghanistan with "the full pomp of Empire," possessed of the certainty that they would replace the Amir with someone less hostile toward their ally, the King of the Punjab. Three years later, a single British horseman rode out of the Afghan mountains into India-the sole survivor of the original vast contingent. "The Mulberry Empire" is the story of the politics and people on both sides of this conflict.

The Namesake
by Jhumpa Lahiri
Lahiri portrays the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. Lahiri reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves.

The Swallows of Kabul
by John Cullen
Set in Kabul under the rule of the Taliban, this novel takes readers into the lives of two couples on opposite sides of the religious conflict. All of their lives have been altered by the Taliban, and a dramatic incident involving the stoning of an adulterous woman brings them together in a story of absurd cruelty and transcendent love and sacrifice.