Chris's Picks

Here the veil is ripped away from modern China--its venerable culture, its teeming economy, its institutionalized cruelty--and the inextricable link between China's fortunes and America's is underscored. In the depths of a Beijing winter, during the waning days of Deng Xiaoping's reign, the U.S. ambassador's son is found dead--his body entombed in a frozen lake. Almost simultaneously, American officials find a ship adrift in the storm-churned waters off Southern California. No one is surprised to find the fetid hold crammed with hundreds of undocumented Chinese immigrants--the latest cargo in the Chinese mafia's burgeoning smuggling trade.

Coming Soon By Lisa See: Shanghai Girls

The year is 1570, and in the convent of Santa Caterina in the Italian city of Ferrara noble women find space to pursue their lives under God's protection. But any community, however smoothly run, suffers tremors when it takes in someone by force. And the arrival of Santa Caterina's new novice sets in motion a chain of events that will shake the convent to its core.
The sixteen-year-old daughter of a noble family from Milan, Serafina is willful, emotional, sharp, and defiant—young enough to have a life to look forward to and old enough to know when that life is being cut short. Her first night inside the walls is spent in an incandescent rage so violent that the dispensary mistress, Suora Zuana, is dispatched to the girl's cell to sedate her. Thus begins a complex relationship of trust and betrayal between the young rebel and the clever, scholarly nun, who is old enough to be Serafina's mother.