No Asian culture is more steeped in the rituals and power of magic as Indonesia. In his debut novel, Indonesian-born author Erick Setiawan presents a bewitching but modern fantasy world in which two feuding families live in horribly haunted houses full of spirits and spells. Yet their lives are ruled by universal values — love, desire, loss and pain — firmly rooted in human emotions.
Alison Gee
Alison Gee is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in People, InStyle, the International Herald Tribune and Los Angeles Times. She is a former editor of Asiaweek magazine and is presently writing an India-based literary memoir, The Peacock Sings for Rain (St. Martin’s Press, 2009).
Dreaming India
After a narrow escape from a fatal form of cancer, New York writer Katherine Russell Rich spent a year in India learning Hindi. She had no idea just how radically the language would change her life, her mind, her very being.
Bound-Foot in China
In a remote village in southwestern China live 300 women whose feet were crushed long ago to the size of a child’s. They are the last survivors haunted by a mutilating tradition that lasted a millennium — solely for men’s pleasure.
