"Gilmour captures the spirit of life in the sharply defined spheres of Queen Victoria's court and the government in London, the viceroy's circle in South Asia, and the district offices where British civil servants met Indian subjects on a daily basis. He skillfully depicts the peculiar mixture of proper manners and gentlemanly practices and the legal and bureaucratic standards of one of the world's great civil services . . . The title of the book succinctly captures his idea that the British colonizers operated as though they were a part of the Indian caste system—thus garnering the mystique of authority without having to rely unduly on force."—Foreign Affairs

"Ghosh's best and most ambitious work yet is an adventure story set in nineteenth-century Calcutta against the backdrop of the Opium Wars. On the Ibis, a ship engaged in transporting opium across the Bay of Bengal, varied life stories converge. A fallen raja, a half-Chinese convict, a plucky American sailor, a widowed opium farmer, a transgendered religious visionary are all united by the 'smoky paradise' of the opium seed. Ghosh writes with impeccable control, and with a vivid and sometimes surprising imagination: a woman's tooth protrudes 'like a tilted gravestone'; an opium addict's writhing spasms are akin to 'looking at a pack of rats squirming in a sack'; the body of a young man is 'a smoking crater that had just risen from the ocean and was still waiting to be explored.'"—The New Yorker

"Snow Falling in Spring joins other important books about the Cultural Revolution . . . as childhood testimonies to national trauma, cautionary tales for our own time, and appreciations for homes, old and new." —San Francisco Chronicle

"As a whole [these stories] create an imaginative and disturbing vision of life at its most oppressive."—Rodney Welch, Freetimes

"The Street of a Thousand Blossoms has epic ambitions—considerable scope, encompassing the years 1939-66; a multitude of significant characters; and recurring moments of tragedy and redemption. But it's written in the reassuringly small-scale style of a folk tale, characterized by short anecdotes and a heavy dose of morals . . . Tsukiyama's prose is simple and slow, at times seeming to strive for the kind of eloquence found in a Noh play, whose centuries-old art depends on stylized action to create tension and drama."—Louisa Thomas, The New York Times

"Ben Steele, a young cowboy on his home range in Montana who had enlisted as a soldier in World War II, was caught up in the battle for Bataan in the Philippines, then in the ensuing death march as a prisoner of the Japanese, which he barely survived. Beginning with harrowing sketches of that experience, and in the course of various adventures and misadventures, he continued to draw and paint, and has since become a truly distinguished artist of the West. Tears in the Darkness is a well-told, well-researched, and moving narrative."—Peter Matthiessen, author of Shadow Country

"[A] fascinating, angry book about the impact of modernity on India, Pakistan, Nepal, Afghanistan and Tibet. Temptations of the West tells of the complex, often violent struggle of ancient societies to define themselves in the face of cultural, political and religious intrusions from outside . . . Mishra has a talent for discovering such extraordinary, even lurid characters to illuminate his account of dashed dreams, clashing religions, huge wealth, crushing poverty, corruption, oppression and, almost unbelievably, hope . . . This is not a gentle book, but it is a brave one—and, for anyone in the West able to look beyond clichés and rhetoric, an essential one."—Ben MacIntyre, The New York Times Book Review

"An excellent introduction to China for anyone in search of solid but concise information about that complicated country. Packed with facts and figures, but enlivened with firsthand observations."—Lucian W. Pye, The New York Times

"Mr. Silbey tells this little-known story in exemplary fashion. A War of Frontier and Empire is a short, fast-paced book, which offers a good summary of the military history while making room for fascinating excursions into economic, social, and cultural issues."—Adam Kirsch, The New York Sun