Kunsang thought she would never leave Tibet. One of Tibet's youngest nuns, she grew up in a remote mountain village where, as a teenager, she entered the local nunnery. Though simple, Kunsang's life gave her all she needed: a oneness with nature, a sense of the spiritual in all things. She married a monk, had two children and lived in peace and prayer. But not for long.

There was a saying in Tibet: 'When the iron bird flies and horses run on wheels, the Tibetan people will be scattered like ants across the face of the earth.' The Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950 changed everything for Kunsang. When Chinese soldiers began destroying her monastery, she and her family were forced to flee in a hair-raising trek across the Himalayas in winter. She spent several years in Indian refugee camps. Both her husband and her younger child died. Then came an extraordinary turn of events: the arrival of Martin Brauen, a cultured young Swiss man with a fascination for Tibet, who fell in love with her daughter and took both of them to Switzerland where Yangzom would be born, the author of this remarkable book.

Many important stories lie hidden until the right person arrives to tell them. Yangzom Brauen has rescued the story of her inspirational grandmother, writing a book full of love and endurance, and giving us a rare and vivid glimpse of life in rural Tibet before the arrival of the Chinese.

Indian Summer (Koharu biyori) is a relatively short novel by Kanai Mieko (b. 1947), recognized by critics both inside and outside Japan as one of the most important Japanese writers of recent decades. The work brilliantly demonstrates Kanai's light-hearted wit in addition to her penchant for biting commentary on conservative elements in Japanese society. Kanai is also an acclaimed essayist, film critic, literary critic, and poet, and has produced a steady output of high-quality material since making her literary debut in her teens. The book also contains two additional stories.

Beginning in 1907 with the founding of a factory in Songarh, a small provincial town where narrow attitudes prevail, the story is of three generations of an Indian family, brilliantly told, in which a sensitive and intelligent foundling boy orphan who is casteless and without religion and Bakul, the motherless granddaughter of the house, grow up together. The boy, Mukunda, spends his time as a servant in the house or reading the books of Mrs Barnum, an Anglo-Englishwoman whose life was saved long ago by Bakul's grandmother, by now demented by loneliness. Mrs Barnum gives Mukunda the run of her house, but as he and Bakul grow, they become aware that their intense closeness is becoming something else, and Bakul's father is warned to separate them. He banishes Mukunda to a school in Calcutta. The many strands of this intensely-fashioned narrative converge when Mukunda, by now a successful businessman, returns to Songarh years after he has been exiled from the only home he knew, to resolve the family's destiny.

Single Sickness and Other Stories opens a window onto the intriguing fictional world of award-winning author Masuda Mizuko. In her writing, Masuda explores issues of female subjectivity and biology, and examines themes of selfhood and autonomy, loneliness and desire, and the deep tensions inherent in female-male relations. The seven stories in this volume tap into an undercurrent of disquiet that pervades contemporary urban society in Japan. Single people—mainly women—chart their way in a world permeated with anxiety and unease, especially when it comes to relations between the sexes. Masuda skillfully evokes the air of menace underlying everyday life and the whiff of danger in the domestic.

In the first story, "Smoke," a meditation on ordinary garbage bags and a violent encounter with a stranger in a stairwell combine in unexpected ways to prompt a woman to recall a marriage gone wrong and the husband she never really knew. In "Water," a leak in the apartment below brings a young woman into conflict with her belligerent male neighbor, creating havoc with her single-girl plans and turning her life upside down. In "Horn," a middle-aged spinster suddenly sprouts a horn in the center of her forehead and acquires some unusual powers. In the title story, "Single Sickness," a female cancer researcher in a male-dominated medical lab has been made cynical by her constant battle against sexism. Her hard protective shell is broken by the sudden discovery of a lump in her breast, and she finds herself confronting issues of independence, isolation, maternity and sexuality. In these and other stories, Masuda uses the motif of singlehood as a way into the heart of her characters.

Tu' is a young tour guide working in Hanoi for a company called New Dawn. While he leads tourists through the city, including American vets on "war tours," he starts to wonder what it is they are seeing of Vietnam—and what they miss entirely. Maggie, who is Vietnamese by birth but has lived most her life in the U.S., has returned to her country of origin in search of clues to her dissident father's disappearance during the war. Holding the story together is Old Man Hung, who has lived through decades of political upheaval and has still found a way to feed hope to his community of pondside dwellers.

This is a keenly observed and skillfully wrought novel about the reverberation of conflict through generations, the enduring legacy of art, and the redemption and renewal of long-lost love.