2023 Read Widely: Southeast Asia

When a successful New York lawyer suddenly disappears without a trace, neither his wife nor his daughter Julia has any idea where he might be--until they find a love letter he wrote many years ago to a Burmese woman they have never heard of. Intent on solving the mystery and coming to terms with her father's past, Julia decides to travel to the village where the woman lived. There she uncovers a tale of unimaginable hardship, resilience, and passion...

"A reluctant medium is about to discover the ties that bind can unleash a dangerous power. . . . When Jessamyn Teoh starts hearing a voice in her head, she chalks it up to stress. Closeted, broke and jobless, she's moving back to Malaysia with her parents - a country she last saw when she was a toddler. She soon learns the new voice isn't even hers, it's the ghost of her estranged grandmother. In life, Ah Ma was a spirit medium, avatar of a mysterious...

The Communist Pathet Lao has taken over this former French colony. Most of the educated class has fled, but Dr. Siri Paiboun, a Paris-trained doctor whose late wife had been an ardent Communist, remains. And so this 72-year-old physician is appointed state coroner, despite the fact that he has no training or even supplies to use in performing his new task. What he does have is curiosity and integrity. At his age he is not about to let a bunch of ignorant...

"An American GI, two Vietnamese bargirls, and an Amerasian man are forced to make decisions during and after the Viet Nam War that will reverberate throughout one another's lives"--

"Singapore, 1942. As Japanese troops sweep down Malaysia and into Singapore, a village is ransacked, leaving only two survivors and one tiny child. In a neighboring village, seventeen-year-old Wang Di is strapped into the back of a troop carrier and shipped off to a Japanese military brothel where she is forced into sexual slavery as a 'comfort woman.' After sixty years of silence, what she saw and experienced still haunts her. In the year 2000, twelve-year-old...

In August 1883, a catastrophic volcanic eruption off the coast of Java was followed by a tsunami that killed nearly 40,000 people. The author brings new perspective to this iconic event, showing how it marked a change in East-West relations.

A journalist draws on his immersive visits to the remote Indonesian island of the Lamalerans, the world's last subsistence whalers, to profile their way of life and illuminate how their indigenous culture is succumbing to the modern world.

"Following a mysterious murder on an island off the coast of Vietnam, a research team convenes to study an octopus community that seems to be developing its own language and culture. Humans, AIs, and animals are swept up in the machinations of governments and corporations in this near-future thriller about the nature of intelligence"--

An astonishing and powerful new novel from PEN/Hemingway finalist Vaddey Ratner. Leaving the safety of America, Teera returns to Cambodia for the first time since her harrowing escape as a child refugee. She carries a letter from a man who mysteriously signs himself as "the Old Musician" and claims to have known her father in the Khmer Rouge prison where he disappeared twenty-five years ago. Arriving in Phnom Penh, Teera finds a society still in turmoil,...

"All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. Exploring how this troubled memory works in Vietnam, the United States, Laos, Cambodia, and South Korea, the book deals specifically with the Vietnam War and also war in general. He reveals how war is a part of our identity, as individuals and as citizens of nations armed to the teeth. Venturing through literature, film, monuments, memorials, museums, and landscapes...