What's Up?

Not posting much this week - my energy is going to an application for promotion at work (I hate online applications that won't let me save a partial application!) and other life stuff. Like a sing at a local hospice last weekend, my Artist Play group gearing up for fall, and getting ready to facilitate a small group at my place of worship. Oh yes, and reading. I've currently got 3 books started.

The Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead

The Race Beat
by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff

All the birds in the sky
by Charlie Jane Anders 

And two book-related events I'd like to go to this fall:

AJC Decatur Book Festival Labor Day Weekedn

(I consider this annual event my birthday present!)

Nisi Shaw (Everfair) at Charis Books September 23

What are you up to?

Golden Scales: a mystery series set in Egypt

Set in the late 1990s, Golden Scales is the first in a projected 10-book series about Makana, a exiled police inspector from Sudan, covering the 1990s up to the Egyptian revolution.

On the surface this is a mystery, with the main character, Makana, hired by a powerful businessman, Hanifi, to locate a missing soccer player, Adil. But life is rarely simple, and personal & political ramifications proliferate as Makana searches for Adil in Cairo. The story is laced with uncomfortable parallels of loss between Hanifi's & Makana's family, as well as between the British woman Liz & Makana.

Makana's integrity after the '90s coup in Sudan endangered his family. Now, living in exile in Egypt, he again attempts to balance integrity & survival where the practice of one attribute endangers the implementation of the other. I liked this novel. It can be read as a straight-up mystery, but following Makana, his friends (and his enemies) also gives a glimpse of some of the societal concerns shaping life in Egypt and Sudan.

The fifth book in the series, City of Jackals, was published in June 2016. For more information about the author, see his two websites: Parker Bilal (his pen name for mysteries) or Jamal Mahjob (his literary fiction) or his Wikipedia entry or this interesting article from 2013. Thanks to Suzanne on Library Thing for introducing me to this series!

Title: Golden Scales
Copyright: 2012
Genre: mystery
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Author: Parker Bilal (pseudonym for Jamal Mahjob)

Also listed in Akilah's Diversity on the Shelf and Naz' Read Diverse Books challenges.

New Releases on the Horizon

Here are some books to be published later this year (or possibly into 2017) that I'm interested in. And they fit in well with this week's top ten Tuesday theme as well. Check out the "Speculative Fiction in Translation" post at Tor.com if you're interested in more translated science/speculative fiction titles.




 Everfair by Nisi Shaw is a steampunk alternate history of the Congo. Thanks to Jordan at Forever Lost in Literature for highlighting this on her blog this week.





Invisible Planets is a collection of science fiction stories by Chinese authors translated by Ken Liu. Due out in November 2016.






 Iraq + 100 is a collection of speculative fiction stories by Iraqi authors, imaging what Iraq will be like in 2103, edited by Hassan Blasim.






Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada, tranlsated by Susan Bernofsky, is about a family of writers and performers in East Germany.






Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi & winner of the 2014 prize for Arabic fiction. Jonathan Wright is translating it into English. (Arabic cover shown.) Hadi al-Attag roams the city of Baghdad, collecting the parts of people who have been dismembered in explosions & sewing them into one body. When a displaced soul enters the body, it comes to life and sets about taking revenge on those who killed its parts.





Spanish Women of Wonder is a collection of stories written in Spanish and translated into English by Sue Burke. This was a kickstarter project, and I'm sure these authors will be new to me. (No cover available.)

2018

And finally, though this isn't a translation, it's one I'm really excited about: Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea novels are being published in an omnibus edition with illustrations by Charles Vess!

Top Ten Tuesday: Books set outside the USA

OK, so I went a little overboard on this one. I'm looking forward to what others post for this meme, since I'm always looking for international reads. If you want to see what other bloggers posted, check out this link.

The first three on my list came to mind easily, I had to look up the rest on my Library Thing account to jog my memory. Except for as noted, the author is from the country the book is set in.

Fiction

Golden Scales by Parker Bilal

Genre: mystery (first in a series)

Setting: Egypt; author is of British & Sudanese descent

A golden age & The good Muslim by Tamima Anam 

Genre: historical fiction

Setting: East Pakistan/Bangladesh during & after war for independence

The hired man by Aminatta Forna 

Genre: historical fiction

Setting: Eastern Europe; author is Scottish & Sierra Leone ish?

Dust by Yvonne A. Owuor

Genre: historical fiction

Setting: Kenya

The garden of evening mists by Tan Twan  Eng

Genre: historical fiction

Setting: Malaysia

Anything by Amitav Ghosh, an  Indian writer,
especially Hungry Tide, Sea of Poppies & River of Smoke

Genre: historical fiction 

Setting: India, China

A Persian Requiem by Simin Daneshvar, translated by Roxane Zand

Genre: historical fiction

Setting: Iran

God's of tango (Argentina) &
The invisible mountain (Uruguay)
by Carolina de Robertis

Genre: historical fiction 

Author is of Uruguayan descent.

The three body problem by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu (first in a trilogy)

Genre: science fiction
(set during the cultural revolution, this novel won the Hugo for best novel in 2015.)

Setting: China

Non fiction

Behind the beautiful forevers by Katherine Boo

Genre: narrative nonfiction

Setting: India; follows several families in a slum near the Mumbai airport.

The author is an investigative reporter who writes on poverty in the US. 

Born & raised in the US, Boo is a Pulitzer winner & this book reads easily.

Story of the Qu'ran: it's place in Muslim life by Ingrid Mattson

Genre: non fiction

I found this a fascinating description of the history of the Qu'ran & it's interpretation from an academic believer's perspective. I include it since the Qu'ran originated in what we now know as Saudi Arabia, and the academic study of this scripture was pioneered and continues to be taught more outside the US than in.

If the oceans were ink: an unlikely friendship and a journey to the heart of the Koran by Caria Power

Genre: memoir

Setting: England & India

The author is a US citizen; her parents were Quaker & Jewish. She met Sheikhh Mohammad Akram Nadwi, an Indian imam living in England while they were both at Oxford University. This book chronicles her study of the Koran over one year with Nadwi, as well as her description of his training & activities as an imam.

The butterfly mosque by Willow Wilson

Genre: memoir

Setting: Egypt

The author is a US citizen. The book describes meeting her husband and converting to Islam while living in Egypt.