New-Book Roundups:
Get Shorty

A collection of 12 short stories from 2008 MacArthur "genius" award-winning author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck explores the ties that bind Nigeria and the United States. Man Booker Prize-winning author Aravind Adiga's short-story compilation, Between the Assassinations, is set in Kittur, southern India, and follows a diverse cast of characters in the years between the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and that of her son Rajiv in 1991. The short stories in The Beijing of Possibilities, by Jonathan Tel, link a group of Beijing residents who range from a messenger of Gorillagrams to an advertising exec who signs up with a dating service.

Family Portraits

The Wish Maker, by Ali Sethi, sketches the members of a boisterous extended family in modern-day Lahore, Pakistan, as 20-year-old Zaki Shirazi comes home from his Massachusetts college to attend his cousin's wedding. The novel The Marriage Bureau for Rich People, by Farahad Zama, takes a light-hearted look at an arranged-marriage business in contemporary India. Mariolina Venezia tells the stories of five generations of a memorable southern Italian family from World War I to the 1980s in Been Here a Thousand Years. Border Songs, by Jim Lynch, goes behind news headlines to depict life in a small U.S.-Canada border town, full of quiet family drama, odd local characters, and an appreciation for a rural way of life that's changing.

Reading Matchmaker
If You Like . . .

. . . the "Afghan Girl," the famous photograph of the refugee with the haunting green eyes that appeared on the cover of National Geographic in 1985, check out the newest monograph by its photographer, Steve McCurry. Titled The Unguarded Moment, the handsome book from Phaidon Press collects 75 new and iconic landscape-format images from one of the most admired photojournalists working today. They range from fishermen checking their nets in a lake in Kashmir to a baby in a bicycle sling in Angkor, Cambodia.

One Last Thing
Starting Over in Kauai

Beginning a new life in a paradisiacal place is a popular fantasy. It prompted Peter Mayle to move to Provence and Frances Mayes to Tuscany. On numerous visits to Hawaii over the years, I have had my own Peter Mayle moments, looking over a sun-splashed scene of blue-green water, sprawling sand beach, and waving palm trees, and thinking: What if I quit my job, sold my house, and just moved here? What would that be like? Lucinda Fleeson answers that question in her compelling new memoir, Waking Up in Eden. When an unexpected offer to work at the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Hawaii arrives, Fleeson leaves her job as a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and moves to the edge of a rain forest in rural Kauai. With a reporter's skill for unearthing and explaining complicated histories and a travel writer's keen eye and ear for the illuminating detail, Fleeson fills in the fantasy's blank—and paints a multi-faceted portrait of Paradise.