Best Asian Books of the Decade?

After my blog post about The Times list of best books of the decade, I got chatting to Adrienne Loftus-Parkins* about how there should be more Asian books on the list. I said that we should have a list of Asian best books, and Adrienne took up the challenge, writing to me later :

Hi Sharon,

Okay here is a first pass, nothing is in any particular order (yet) and its absolutely not ready for publication. I'm sending to get your input - particularly re the ones I haven't read (but am sure you have) and any others I don't know about. Please add whatever you'd like to, and mark the ones you completely disagree with. Then I'll take another pass at it.

Thanks, have fun with it.

Adrienne

PS You'll see that I've included a couple of British Asian books - occupational hazard of living in London!

The Best Asian Books of the Decade :

Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng

Temptations of the West – How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond by Pankaj Mishra

Silk Road by Colin Thubron

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta

Beijing Coma – Ma Jian

The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam

Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin

The Temple-Goers by Aatish Taseer

Harmony Silk Factory by Tash Aw

The Last Song of Dusk by Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi

Inspector Chen Series by Qiu Xiaolong

The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh

Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra ( but a touch too long)

Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry ( not as good as A Fine Balance – isn’t it time he wrote another book?)

Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

The Golden Age by Tahmima Anam

Butcher and Bolt by David Loyn – excellent primer on Afghanistan

Greetings from Bury Park: Race Religion and Rock and Roll by Sarfraz Mansoor

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

Snow by Orhan Pamuk (although I feel My Name is Red is better, this one is more relevant to contemporary Turkey)

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie

The White Moghuls by William Dalrymple

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts but could have been abou t30% shorter

White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

Descent into Chaos by Ahmed Rashid

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

China Road by Rob Gifford

Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century by Will Hutton

God’s Terrorists by Charles Allen (fascinating although the author felt he could have done better)

Holy Warriors: A Journey into the Heart of Indian Fundamentalism by Edna Fernandes

Khandahar Cockney by James Fergusson – eye opening book about the life of an asylum seeker from Afghanistan

I might not have suggest these but people suggested them ( ie I don’t think they are as great as other people do!):

Brick Lane by Monica Ali – not so sure about this one, but a number of people suggested it.

Persepolis: The Story of an Iranian Childhood by Marjane Satrapi

The Kite Runner by Khalid Hosseini

The Places in Between by Rory Stewart

Ones I haven’t read but I understand are noteworthy.

The Vagrants by Yiyun Li

The Boat by Nam Le

Madwoman on the Bridge by Su Tong

Evening is the Whole Day by Preeta Samarasan

Once on the Shore by Paul Yoon

The Calligrapher’s Daughter by Eugenia Kim

The Assassin’s Song by MG Vassanji

Imperial Life in The Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran

So now I kick the list over to you - which books do you think should have been included on the list? Which titles would you vote for and why?

Postscript :

Let me also slip in this link to Asian Literary Review editor Chris Woods' list of best books of 2009 [via] which has some excellent Asian titles on it.

*A correction needed here. Adrienne's company is The Asian Word and the Lit fest is only one of Adrienne's products. She curates other Asian literature events at other venues in London (current projects are at the National Portrait Gallery and at Kings Place) as well as the first Asian women's literature festival which will take place in London in October / November and will be produced in partnership with the Pan Asian Women's Association (PAWA). More about these projects later.

Asia House Festival and Tash's UK Launch

Britain will be celebrating its first major literary festival dedicated to Asian writing in May. The Asia House Festival of Asian Literature runs 11-22 May and features over over 25 authors,
highlighting writing from ten Asian countries.

Some of the writers appearing :

Amit Chaudhuri, Sir Mark Tully, Hardeep Singh Kohli, Ziauddin Sardar, Kamila Shamsie, Nadeem Aslam, Christina Lamb, Alice Albinia, Kenan Malik, Patrick Cockburn, and BBC journalists Frank Gardner, John Simpson and David Lyon.

There are also some pre-festival events and these include the UK launch of Tash Aw's book Map of the Invisible World on May 7th, where the author will be interviewed by Karim Raslan. If you happen to be there (and I hope to be) let's go give the fellow a big cheer.