Authors: Hosseini, Khaled
Translated by: Čeponis, Jonas
Translated from: English
Published on: 2010

”A Thousand Splendid Suns” is the book about two Afghanistan women‘s lives from childhood to adultery. Marjama is illegitimate daughter of a businessman. She and her mother live in a small house in poor conditions. The girl cannot even dream about education, beautiful future or better life in general. Leila, differently than Marjama, lives surrounded by the love of family. She studies and has dreams of the future. It seems that these two girls live in completely different worlds. The education and level of life is separated between them. It looks like the ways of them could never intersect, but the opposite occurs. The destiny has decided to bring them together and eventually they both become one and the same man’s wife. Marjama was forced to marry man she does not love. Leila lost her family during the war, so she hadn‘t other choice just to marry man who promised to take care of her. More

Authors: Sundaresan, Indu
Translated by: Žalytė, Danguolė
Translated from: English
Published on: 2010

Sundaresan (The Twentieth Wife ) returns to 17th-century India in this romantic fictionalization of the life of Jahanara, the oldest child of the empress Mumtaz Mahal, Shah Jahan’s cherished wife. Mumtaz dies in childbirth, leaving four sons, two teenage daughters and a newborn girl. The grief-stricken emperor seeks consolation in the construction of the Taj, the magnificent Luminous Tomb, while the profundity of his mourning exposes his fallibility to his sons, who begin eyeing his throne. Jahanara and her sister Roshanara choose to back different brothers, and they compete to rule in both the royal harem and their father’s heart. Before long, Jahanara is the one who succeeds as the emperor’s closest confidante, and he refuses to allow her to leave him to marry. More

Authors: Shafak, Elif
Translated by: Bielskytė, Eglė
Translated from: English
Published on: 2010

‘‘The Bastard of Istanbul‘‘ is a mysterious novel in which both past and present overlaps, a painful history of Turkish and Armenian people is being discussed. Also, roots of two different families mengle and secrets of those families finally turn out.
The begining of a book is quite tragical. A young turkish woman goes to see a doctor in order to end her pregnancy but things work out different, thus, change a lot. Further writer tells a story about teen girl who lives in Istanbul. Her name is Asya Kazanci and she is quite strange nihilist. Her life is tough because she lives with six aunties and somehow all men of their family pass away suddenly at early age. At the same time a portret of Armanoush Tchakhmakhchian is being developed. Armanoush is an Armenian origin American who lives in Arizona with her paranoid mother and Turk stepfather. Sometimes she travels to San Francisco to visit her father‘s family. Contrary to Asya, Armanoush enjoys life and wants to get to know as much as possible about her family roots, for this reason, one day she decides to come to Istanbul. More

Authors: Pamuk, Orhan
Translated by: Pilkauskaitė, Justina
Translated from: Turkish
Published on: 2010

Notwithstanding the fact that the main character is engaged with a perfect girl, he falls in love with another one – Fusin. The family‘s luck which has been planned for a long time, the betrothal which has been held in the “Hilton“hotel together with the elite of Istanbul are destroyed. The man who had a perfect life becomes the loner collecting simple things which seem special for him because they were touched by the hand of the extraordinary woman. All this stuff is turned into the museum‘s exhibits telling about an everlasting love full of pain. More

Authors: Abdolah, Kader
Translated by: Mumėnaitė, Birutė
Translated from: Dutch
Published on: 2010

The story begins well in July 1969.The hereditary owners of the town’s congregational mosque occupy a large, old house. The best passage shows how the modernising autocracy of Shah Mohammed Reza – brutal, cynical, in a desperate hurry – all but overran even traditional Iranian towns in the first half of the 1970s. In the revolution of 1979, mosque house come painfully to grief. The Shah is losing his hold on power; the Ayatollah Khomeini incites rebellion from his exile in France; and one day the Ayatollah returns—the consequences of which will be felt in every corner of Mosque house. Ingenious, but complacent in their habits and religion, they are no match for the rough customers of the revolution. More

Authors: Murakami, Haruki
Translated by: Jomantienė, Irena, Dyke, Milda

“Dance Dance Dance” is the sixth novel by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami first published in 1988.

The novel follows the surreal misadventures of an unnamed protagonist who makes a living as a commercial writer. The protagonist is compelled to return to the Dolphin Hotel, a seedy establishment where he once spent the night with a woman he loved, despite the fact he never even knew her real name. She has since disappeared without a trace, the Dolphin Hotel has been purchased by a large corporation and converted into a slick, fashionable, western-style hotel. More

Authors: Murakami, Haruki
Translated by: Susnytė, Ieva
Translated from: Japanese
Published on: 2009

The name of novel „After Dark“, written by a Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, was an allusion to an authors favourite jazz music piece “Five Spot After dark”, which leads characters through labyrinths of loneliness and roads of self-knowledge.

“After Dark” – it’s a short novel in which we can see the characters’ lives during the witching hours between midnight and dawn. The main characters are two sisters – Eri, who is going through an existence crisis and Mari, who is searching the meaning of life. Besides the two main characters there are also some others, who seem not to be related with two main girls at all: chubby motel manager and her maid, a Chinese prostitute which was savagely assaulted by a client, and a jazz musician who claims that he met Mari at some point in the past. Although it seems, that people, who have such different lives have no opportunity to meet one another in real life but the secrets that haunt them draw them together more powerfully than the different lives that might keep them apart. These secrets might either restore their lives or destroy them forever. More

Authors: Nakagawa, Rieko
Translated by: Ališauskas, Arvydas
Translated from: Japanese
Published on: 2009

“No! No! Nursery school!” it’s a storybook for children, which consists of seven short but instructive stories about the everyday life of children in kindergarten “Tulip”. In the kindergarten children are divided into two groups – “Star” and “Bell”. The first group is for the children who have a lot of time before attending school, while the second group is for the children who will soon go to elementary school. Little ones joke around; play with one another while facing childish every day troubles. We can feel the growing competition between these two groups. The main character of the story is the boy named Siger who belongs to a “Bell” Group. The childish curiosity leads the boy into a wide range of adventures, which are described in “No! No! Nursery school!”. The storybook consists of seven separate parts: “Kindergarten “Tulip” ”, “Whale Hunt”, “Tikotiana”, “Teddy Kogus”, “Wolf”, “Trip to the mountains”, and “No! No! Nursery school!“. More

Authors: Min, Anchee
Translated by: Banelytė, Antanina
Translated from: English
Published on: 2009

“Becoming Madame Mao” is psychological, historical novel published in 2001. In it writer tells a sad, exciting and tragic life story of second-rate actress who was abandoned by her parents and who swung from one romance to another when finally becomes a wife of Mao Dzedung. This is a story about women who betrayed and was betrayed by others and also about a women who all her life strived to fulfill her desire. In this novel, while writing by first or third person, character of heroine is revealed: ambitious, admirable and determined but at the same time vindictive, violent as well as jealous.  While carrying out Cultural Revolution and especially while wanting to become the head of China after death of her husband, women eliminated all her enemies who stood in her way extremely those who humiliated her before or did not let finish her “role”. Madame Mao, also called “White-boned demon”, all her life behaved as she was acting in a play, always on the stage. More

Authors: Ihara Saikaku
Translated by: Jomantienė, Irena, Dyke, Milda
Translated from: English
Published on: 2009

Five women, five love stories. “Five Women Who Loved Love” is a book which follows five determined women lives who were so bold as to seek love and pleasure, in spite of social attitudes about such things. The five heroines are Onatsu, already wise in the ways of love by the age of sixteen; Osen, a faithful wife until unjustly accused of adultery; Osan, a Kyoto beauty who falls asleep in the wrong bed; Oshichi, willing to burn down a city to meet her samurai lover; and Oman, who has to compete with handsome boys to win her lover\’s affections. The heroines are not always admirable women, and their loves are not always beautiful, some of them are little more than aggressive pleasure seekers… More