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 LIANE MORIARTY - "Three wishes" Three Wishes  is about the three Kettle sisters – Cat, Gemma and Lyn  – who also happen to be triplets. The book starts with the eyewitness accounts of bystanders who witness the triplets have a raucous dinner in a Sydney restaurant. The dinner ends with a violent argument and one sister throwing a fork at her pregnant sister, impaling her stomach. The fork thrower then passes out from the shock. Just like the bystanders, the reader has no idea what this is all about and which sister is the culprit. Three Wishes  then plunges into the lives of the Kettle sisters, who it turns out were celebrating their thirty-fourth birthday on the day of the incident. You learn about their family, their love lives (or lack of), their pasts, hopes and their loving, but tempestuous, sibling relationship. Lyn is the successful sister and tightly wound. Cat is passionate and liable to explode at any moment. Gemma is quirky, dreamy and unable to commit to anything

The setting of  The Interior  is summer 1997—China "post-  Deng Xiaoping ", a period characterized by "an unholy alliance between post-Deng Communism (' market socialism ') and American capitalism", the China of  Jiang Zemin . In the novel the narrator speaks about the times in more personal terms: "As the saying went, the blade of grass points where the wind blows. The only problem was that the wind was blowing in so many directions these days no one could completely protect himself". The plot centers on the conniving of American and Chinese businessmen to exploit poorly paid Chinese workers, especially women, for profit and power. See describes in great detail the dangers women face because they work in an American toy factory, located in a remote part of the interior of China, that lacks adequate safety protections and is a virtual fire trap.   Miaoshan was working at the toy factory before her death. Elisabeth Sherwin quotes Lisa See speakin

A crisis reconnects four young firebrands from college who have grown apart as adults, in a story dense with sensitive scrutiny. Straddling India and the United States, this tale of friends reunited in disparate maturity is heavy on internal reflection, lighter on events. The highpoint of Armaiti, Nishta, Laleh and Kavita’s student years in late-1970s’ Bombay was their involvement in political activity, in particular a demonstration that saw two of them arrested. Now, three decades later, Nishta, renamed Zoha, has spent years in an oppressive marriage to Iqbal, a Muslim who has grown very devout. Impulsive Laleh is comfortably settled with her influential husband Adish and children; architect Kavita has finally come to terms with her lesbianism; and, in America, Armaiti has just been diagnosed with an incurable brain tumor, a catastrophe that pulls the four together again at Armaiti’s request. Laleh and Kavita are free to leave India immediately but Nishta has to be found, persuaded

A carefully researched little novel, Otsuka’s first, about the US internment of Japanese citizens during WWII that’s perfect down to the tiniest detail but doesn’t stir the heart. Shortly after the war begins, the father of an unnamed Japanese family of four in Berkeley, California, is taken from his home—not even given time to dress—and held for questioning. His wife and two children won’t see him until after war’s end four years later, when he’ll have been transformed into a suddenly very old man, afraid, broken, and unwilling to speak even a word about what happened to him. Meanwhile, from the spring of 1942 until the autumn after the armistice, the mother, age 42, with her son and daughter of 8 and 11, respectively, will be held in camps in high-desert Utah, treeless and windswept, where they’ll live in rows of wooden barracks offering little privacy, few amenities, and causing them to suffer—the mother especially—greater and greater difficulty in hanging on to any sense of hope