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"The Buddha in the Attic" (by Julie Otsuka)

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The Buddha in the Attic is a 2011 novel written by American author Julie Otsuka about Japanese picture brides immigrating to America in the early 1900s. It is Otsuka's second novel. The novel was published in the United States in August 2011 by the publishing house Knopf Publishing Group . The Buddha in the Attic was nominated for a National Book Award for Fiction (2011) and won the Langum Prize for American Historical Fiction (2011), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (2012), and the Prix Femina Étranger (2012). There is no plot in the usual sense of specific individuals going through particular events. The novel is told in the first person plural, from the point of view of many girls and women, none of whom is individualized as a continuing character, but all of whom are vividly described in a sentence or two. The first chapter, "Come, Japanese!" describes a boatload of Japanese picture brides coming to California to marry men they have never met. The

"The bastard of Istanbul" (by Elif Shafak)

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The Bastard of Istanbul is a 2006 novel by Turkish bestselling female author Elif Åžafak , written originally in English and published by Viking Adult . It was translated by Aslı Biçen into her native language Turkish under the title Baba ve Piç in March 2006, and became a bestseller. In her second novel written in English, Elif Shafak confronts her country’s violent past in a vivid and colorful tale set in both Turkey and the United States. At its center is the “bastard” of the title, Asya, a nineteen-year-old woman who loves Johnny Cash and the French Existentialists, and the four sisters of the Kazanci family who all live together in an extended household in Istanbul: Zehila, the zestful, headstrong youngest sister who runs a tattoo parlor and is Asya’s mother; Banu, who has newly discovered herself as a clairvoyant; Cevriye, a widowed high school teacher; and Feride, a hypochondriac obsessed with impending disaster. Their one estranged brother lives in Arizona with his