Sisters Van and Linny Luong, born in America to Vietnamese refugees, have never seen eye to eye. Sensible Van, in her khakis and pageboy haircut, has a law degree, a promising career, a mortgage and a perfect Asian husband. And wild Linny, who could never even finish community college, is spinning her wheels at a “Do It Yourself” catering company in Chicago and sleeping with a married client.

At home in Michigan, their widowed father is marking some milestones of his own—throwing a party to celebrate his new U.S. citizenship and auditioning for a reality show for aspiring inventors (for years, his passion has been devices designed to help the short statured, such as a claw grabber called the “Luong Arm” and a periscope called the “Luong Eye”). An eccentric man, he seems to have given more attention to his harebrained ideas and his gaggle of friends than he has to his family, and both sisters are ambivalent about his achievements.

Regardless, the sisters travel home for the events, and there they must confront some of the forces that shaped them into the young women they became. Linny wonders if her disastrous love life was a result of her suspicions that her father was having an affair of his own, and Van realizes that all of her years of hiding behind school have left her unprepared to deal with the fact that her perfect marriage may be anything but. As Linny’s affair and Van’s marriage both deteriorate, they find in each other a confidante that they never knew they had.

Nguyen made a splash with her memoir, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, and this, her first novel, has been much anticipated—with good reason. In this relatively simple story, she brings in many of the universal challenges facing second-generation immigrants, not avoiding, but almost interrogating the clichés that plague so many similar stories. Her characters are stubborn, selfish and often paralyzed with inaction, but also warm, dutiful and loving, and this careful balance makes them incredibly real and sympathetic. But the real star is the prose itself, which is succinct, efficient and peppered with perfectly chosen details that make each scene come alive.

Rebecca Shapiro is an editor and fellow short girl who writes from Brooklyn, New York.

A father’s criticism of his son, when presented privately, can be devastating enough. The words “I’m disappointed in you” can wrap themselves around a son’s mind and heart so that all decisions henceforth must filter through that statement in fear of what words will follow those haunting four. But familial criticism in the public forum proves to be even more disastrous for Gabriel Santoro after he publishes a novel about a family friend’s 1938 immigration from Germany to Colombia—and his father, a famous professor of rhetoric, gives it a contemptuous review.

Gabriel’s anger over his father’s public denouncement of his novel sends him on a quest to work loose his father’s reasons for doing so. In the course of his research, Gabriel finds that people are not necessarily who they present themselves to be, and that his father harbors a secret that is both disquieting and illuminating.

Juan Gabriel Vázquez’s The Informers presents history as something others have said to be true; fact is but a person’s insistence that things happened as they claimed. Each character in this thoughtful, complex novel truly believes the details of certain events transpired in the way he or she chooses to remember. The story is framed by the U.S. State Department’s blacklists during WWII, and Vázquez uses this practice as a parallel for the personally concealed blacklist—thoughts that are never made public but are still devastating.

Vázquez is an excellent writer and a fine storyteller. By presenting The Informers as his narrator’s second novel—Gabriel’s attempt to mend his eminent father’s reputation with truth, good or bad, following the posthumous airing of his dirty laundry—the author reinforces the idea that there are stories within stories and there are secrets huddling inside spoken words. We come to realize that what we are told is not always truth, and taking people at their word carries with it the risk of being uninformed after all.

Katie Lewis writes from Nashville.

Some people just really love words. Dai Sijie, author of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, is one of those people. His new novel, Once on a Moonless Night, revels in language—or more accurately, languages. The plot hinges on an ancient silk manuscript written in a mysterious tongue, torn in half by the teeth of the last Chinese emperor, Puyi, in a fit of rage, and destined to be a source of fascination and mystery thereafter. This scroll serves as a narrative device that leads the novel through the centuries from Imperial China to 1979, where it piques the interest of a Western student in China. And here enters the love story.

If this all sounds a little complicated, well—it is. But it’s also enthralling. Sijie creates a world in which linguists and word-nerds are the heroes, in which the use of passive verbs is cause for existential delight, in which a greengrocer named for an obscure, ancient language plays a crucial role in history (and the plot). And the author pulls off this feat while writing the kind of sentences you’d like to wrap around yourself and cuddle up in—even in translation from his original French.

Sijie is a filmmaker as well as a novelist, and it’s obvious in his writing: the lush descriptions bring every scene into sharp focus. And despite the enormous pleasure to be gained from his prose, it’s hard not to wish for the movie version of the book to hit theaters soon.

The other great achievement of Once on a Moonless Night is in the way it collapses time, so that the character and setting of the emperor Puyi is just as vivid and immediate as the parts of the book that take place in modern times. Some of this has to do with the way Sijie has brought the power of a sacred text forward into today’s world.

A humble greengrocer in the ’70s shares a name with the language of a sacred text from 1128, and somehow it all makes sense within the gorgeously woven fabric of the novel. The message, or part of the message, is that language can transcend time—and the novel itself is sure to prove the point.

Claire married Martin because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Later, after they moved from England to Hong Kong in 1951, "there had been times when [she] felt that she could become a different person." Still, "the elasticity of her possibility diminished over time" until she met Will, emotionally damaged from earlier experiences, but still able to help her get "out of context."

In the course of Janice Y.K. Lee's exceptional first novel, Claire (the eponymous piano teacher) eventually lands at the far end of the arc of independence she hadn't realized she'd been following from the beginning. Certainly, if one is to do one's own thing, Hong Kong, with its population of rebels and fawners, is the place for it. On the other hand (except perhaps for poor Martin), the other residents all have longer histories of machinations and personal betrayals—how could it be otherwise given the last 10 years of this city's history, the first five of which were spent in trying to survive the brutal Japanese occupation, and the last five in trying to forget it?

The Piano Teacher is split into two alternating narratives: one detailing Will's affair during World War II with the haunting Eurasian beauty Trudy (who dominates the pages during her tenure), and the other exploring his affair with Claire a decade later. This book is well worth reading if only for its pitch-perfect portrayal of a ruthlessly brittle society, so destroyed in the 1940s and revived in the '50s. The moral ambiguities and secrets of citizens and expatriates alike float or sink as they deal (and make deals) with their occupiers.

Lee was herself born and raised in Hong Kong and educated at Harvard. A former editor at Elle and Mirabella magazines, she now lives once more in that extravagant city. Here, Lee has produced a powerful treatment of a precarious place where deceit and betrayal and their consequences are not confined to the war years. And where sometimes, it must seem, the last and best resort is to hunker down and curl up in a ball, to "dissolve into [Hong Kong], be absorbed in its rhythms and become, easily, a part of the world."

For better or for worse.

Maude McDaniel writes from Cumberland, Maryland. 

Nadifa Mohamed grew up listening to her father’s stories of growing up in East Africa in the 1940s, but it was not until she was older that she realized how truly remarkable his life was. Those stories became the basis of her first novelBlack Mamba Boy, an engrossing debut that tells the harrowing story of a resilient Somali boy mired in the politics of war-torn Africa and caught between the attachment to his heritage and the lure of European opportunity.

Jama’s mother nicknamed her son Black Mamba Boy because during her pregnancy, a snake crawled across her belly, which she thought endowed him with luck. When the novel opens, Jama is a street kid living in Yemen who needs all the luck he can get. After his mother dies, Jama travels back to Somalia, the first step of a journey—by foot, camel, bus, train, and ship—that will ultimately take him as far as Britain. Bereft and hungry, Jama travels through Djibouti, Eritrea and the Sudan, following rumors about his missing father, picking up whatever work he can and relying on a loose network of Somali clansman to take him in or offer him a meal. Mussolini’s occupation of East Africa, famines, and the sheer length of the journey threaten to overwhelm the young wanderer at every turn. Jama temporarily settles in Eritrea, where he falls in love with a local girl and marries. But in an uneasy repeat of his father’s story, he leaves his wife to find work in Egypt.

The themes of displacement and emigration finds their most emotional parallel when Jama takes a job on the Runnymeade Park, one of the British ships that carried the European Jews back to Hamburg after they were refused entry into Palestine on the Exodus 1947. Like Jama, these travelers hoped for a better life, convinced that they could leave the hell of war behind them. Their return to holding camps in Germany is one of the book’s most painful moments, and one in which Mohamed makes a strong statement about the instability of the refugee experience.

Black Mamba Boy is filled with petty cruelties and hardship, but it also overflows with life. Jama is sustained by the star-filled night sky, the camaraderie of his fellow travelers, and the varied street life of each small town he passes through. On the other hand, Mohamed makes sure that the reader understands that for every one who survived, like Jama, there were many more who did not. Black Mamba Boy tells an important story in an engaging fashion—one with much relevance to today’s world. 

Lauren Bufferd writes from Nashville, Tennessee.

Spanish writer Carlos Ruiz Zafón returns to the world of his international mega-seller, The Shadow of the Wind, with his latest novel, The Angel’s Game. The setting is Barcelona in the first half of the 20th century—though a fictional Barcelona, envisioned, perhaps, by Poe by way of Buñuel. The story, which has threads that bind it to the earlier novel but can be read independently, once again features the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, the labyrinthian secret library where volumes languish until someone rescues them from eternal obscurity.

The liberator this time is David Martín, who as a young boy is deserted by his mother and ultimately orphaned when his abusive reprobate father is gunned downed in the street by thugs. David seeks refuge in the newspaper offices where he works as an errand boy, and soon shows his talents by writing a popular serial novel for the paper. When he is fired out of jealousy, he cleverly turns out a series of potboilers under a pseudonym.

Then David is approached by a Parisian publisher, Andreas Corelli, to take on a highly lucrative commission, but because of his long-term contract with the philistine publishers of his series, he is obliged to turn down the offer. The lure of the mysterious Corelli’s money is too great, however, and as soon as David agrees to take on the project, his obstructive publishers are killed in a suspicious fire. David, of course, is a prime suspect. Byzantine complications ensue.

The work Corelli hopes David will write will provide the founding myths for a new faith. The volume that David rescues from the Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a theological tract, Lux Aeterna. It is safe to say that Zafón has religion on his mind in The Angel’s Game, in a somewhat more didactic purpose than he seemed to have in The Shadow of the Wind. That earlier book, with its clever blend of gothic and pulp, moved at a more engaging pace than this one. But fans of Zafón’s mesmerizing literary style will not be disappointed as he sweeps them into his curious literary netherworld.

Aravind Adiga’s first novel, The White Tiger, paints a vivid and disturbing picture of life in the strikingly different cultures that comprise modern India. Home to more than 15 percent of the world’s population, the country has grown to become an economic power, and yet vast numbers of its inhabitants have little to show for its prosperity. The conflict created by that reality propels this riveting tale.

Balram Halwai is born into the grinding poverty of the portion of India he calls the “Darkness.” He’s a bright student, nicknamed the White Tiger for an animal that appears only once in a generation. Still, by the accident of his birth it appears he’s sentenced to a near subsistence-level life in his native village, where raw sewage courses through the streets and the residents are at the mercy of venal landowners.

Balram manages to trade his menial job in a local tea shop for a position in New Delhi as the driver for Mr. Ashok, the son of one of the village landlords, and his wife Pinky Madam. In his new role, Balram astutely grasps the workings of the Indian economy, as Mr. Ashok is forced to bribe government officials in order to carry out his business activities. Although Balram confesses early in the first-person narrative that he’s murdered his master, in a tale that faintly echoes Dostoevsky, we learn how the plan to commit that crime gradually and yet inevitably took form. And in a startling denouement, Balram reveals how he capitalizes on his crime to recreate himself as an entrepreneur in the booming Indian economy.

Balram’s voice is seductive and his observations are acute, laced both with a sardonic wit and a trace of sadness as he exposes the inescapable truth that the benefits of India’s remarkable economic success are not dispersed fairly throughout its population. His depiction of life in what he calls the “Rooster Coop,” in which tens of millions of Indians are destined to live short, miserable lives, hounded by poverty and disease, is at times shocking in its brutality and frankness. This intense, unsettling novel will open the eyes of many Western readers.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Most Westerners have a mental picture of Saudi Arabia that's hardly more than a melange of cliches featuring white-robed sheiks climbing into Rolls-Royces to survey vast oil fields. Yousef Al-Mohaimeed's haunting and enigmatic novel, his first published outside Saudi Arabia after being banned there, offers a stark picture of that society.

The central character of Wolves of the Crescent Moon is Turad, a Bedouin and former desert bandit who, as the novel opens, finds himself in the Riyadh bus station with no destination other than one that will take him out of the city he has come to loathe. After losing his ear in a desert incident that's described in wrenching detail at the novel's climax, he has migrated to the capital, moving through a series of menial jobs until he finds a position as a servant at the finance ministry.

Like Turad, the other principal characters of Wolves are physically damaged. Tawfiq is an elderly man who exists on the fringe of Saudi society. Captured in Sudan as a young boy, he is sold into slavery and then castrated. Eventually he drifts into the finance ministry, where he and the Bedouin discover a surprising connection. Nasir is an orphan who mysteriously loses his eye shortly after he's abandoned at birth. In the bus station a stranger hands Turad a government file whose contents recount the mundane facts of Nasir's existence, facts Turad uses as the springboard for an imaginative re-creation of the boy's life. Employing a nonlinear narrative that shimmers with a certain dreamlike quality, Wolves interweaves the lives of these characters in complex and unexpected ways.

It's easy to imagine this tale being narrated by an ancient storyteller to a group of rapt listeners gathered around a blazing desert fire. Al-Mohaimeed's prose is taut and yet lyrical, evoking the harsh beauty of the desert landscape in spare sentences rich with vivid imagery. While his name will be unfamiliar to most American readers, his talent deserves serious attention.