"Li-yan and her family align their lives around the seasons and the farming of tea. There is ritual and routine, and it has been ever thus for generations. Then one day a jeep appears at the village gate--the first automobile any of them have seen--and a stranger arrives. In this remote Yunnan village, the stranger finds the rare tea he has been seeking and a reticent Akha people. In her biggest seller, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, See introduced...

Laos, 1981: When an unofficial mailman drops off a strange bilingual diary, Dr. Siri is intrigued. Half is in Lao, but the other half is in Japanese, which no one Siri knows can read; it appears to have been written during the Second World War. Most mysterious of all, it comes with a note stapled to it: Dr. Siri, we need your help most urgently. But who is "we," and why have they left no return address? To the chagrin of his wife and friends, who...

Cailan, arguably the most high-profile chef in America's Filipino food movement, spent his youth feeling like he wasn't Filipino enough to be Filipino and not American enough to be an American. As an amboy, the term for a Filipino raised in America, he had to overcome cultural traditions and family expectations to find his own path to success. In this memoir/cookbook, Cailan tells that story through his recipes. -- adapted from inside front cover....

Former Navy SEAL Mike Harmon investigates how pirates in the Singapore Straits acquired top-secret computer chips designed to run nuclear reactors, a case that threatens the fledgling democratic government in Myanmar.

Before Raffles, before Rajah Brooke, there was Francis Light, the 18th-century trailblazer in the Malay Archipelago. The 18th-century Straits of Malacca is in crisis, beleaguered by the Dutch, the Bugis, and the clash between Siam and Burma. Enter Francis Light, devious manipulator of the status quo, joined by a cast of real historical figures from the courts of Siam and Kedah and from the East India Company, including Sultan Muhammed Jiwa, King Tak...

From ancient Malay settlements to Spanish colonization, the American occupation and beyond, A History of the Philippines recasts various Philippine narratives with an eye for the layers of colonial and post-colonial history that have created this diverse and fascinating population. A History of the Philippines begins with the pre-Westernized Philippines in the 16th century and continues through the 1899 Philippine-American War, the nation's relationship...

On a hot August afternoon in 1811, an army of 10,000 British redcoats splashed ashore through the muddy shallows off Batavia (the former name of Jakarta, Indonesia's capital) to conquer the Dutch colony of Java. They would remain there for five turbulent years. Drawing on both British and Javanese archival sources, this entertaining and highly readable narrative history-cum-biography explores the bloody battles and furious controversies that marked...

Korea: A Walk through the Land of Miracles is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand a nation that is shaping the modern world. In the 1980s South Korea was still an enigma. Simon Winchester was sent there as a young journalist to report on a Hyundai shipyard - and what he saw made him determined to return, to take a proper look at how an economic miracle was shaped. In a bookshop in Seoul he came across the story of a Dutch ship, the Sparrowhawk,...