Sacrifice and Love

When the Kitchen God gets caught criticizing the Jade Emperor's management of Earth's affairs, his punishment is to uncover the mysterious workings of the human heart.  To achieve this, he decides to follow one couple, Bian Yuying and Hou Jinyi -- from the Japanese occupation, through Mao's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, and ultimately to death -- telling their story of love, compassion, and forgiveness.  Sam Meekings' Under Fishbone Clouds is a beautifully written testament to the strength and power one can derive from love in the most desperate of conditions.  HM

The Little Red Guard: A Family Memoir

In his memoir of growing up during the waning years of the Cultural Revolution, Wenguang Huang frames his experiences around one all-pervasive family event -- his grandmother's funeral.  Though traditional burials were officially banned by the state, Huang Ma asserts her authority and over the course of the author's childhood, manages to persuade the family to build a coffin and secure a grave site in her ancestral village.  Huang's narrative is a mix of bittersweet coming-of-age story and a portrait of a society that is changing at a rapid pace.  HM

Living Under The Great Leader

Culled from interviews with defectors, journalist Barbara Demick calls Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea an oral history of the people. Published in 2009, her subjects' recollections span the years after Kim Il-sung's rise following WWII and the transfer of power to Kim Jong-il after his father's death. Piecing together stories and memories, Demick is able to pull aside the curtain that has kept North Korea virtually closed to foreigners for the past half-decade and illustrate the daily struggles and suffering of the people themselves, from the "glory days" of the Kim regime through the Arduous March of the 1990s, a famine that killed anywhere between 800,000 to 3.5 million people.

Nothing to Envy was awarded the 2010 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize and was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award. HM