Get Ready to Read for the Win 2016 - Stories Set in a Different Culture - Need Help With That Square?

Get ready for this year's summer reading program Read for the Win, which will be kicking off Sunday, June 12 and will run through Sunday, July 31.

This year you'll be selecting different categories from our summer reading BINGO card.

To help you get started, here's a few suggestions for some good reads for one of the squares' categories - Set in a Different Culture.

Have fun and read for the win!

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan 

Set in 19th c. China when women's feet were bound and they often lived a life of seclusion for the rest of the world. The women in one remote Hunan province create their own secret code which they painted on fans or embroidered on their handkerchiefs to communicate their thoughts and dreams to each other. Two girls to be paired and communicate are Snow Flower and Lily. As the years pass, thorough famine and rebellion, they reflect upon their arranged marriages, loneliness, and the joys and tragedies for motherhood.

The Secret River
This the story of Grenville's ancestry, who wrested a new life from the alien terrain of Australia and its native people. London, 1806. William Thornhill, a Thames bargeman, is deported to the New South Wales colony that would become Australia.


The Poisonwood Bible
The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it--from garden seeds to Scripture--is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.

Eva Luna
A woman makes love to an India dying of a snakebite, miraculously restoring him to life and engendering a daughter named Eva "so she will love life." Set in Latin America, it relates Eva's picaresque adventures.

G'Day Mate: Aussie Authors

Australia is famous for many things kangaroos, koalas, The Great Barrier Reef and a wonderful literary tradition as well. Australian authors are slowly but steadily entering the American market with great success. With the recent death of bestselling Australian author Colleen McCullough (1937-2015) and the emergence of several bestselling authors Graeme C. Simsion and Liane Moriarty I was curious about other popular Aussie novelists, and discovered some real gems. Check out one of these fine novels from the land down-under.


Bittersweet
Colleen McCullough
McCullough intertwines a sweeping story of two sets of twins--all trained as nurses but each with her own ambitions. Because they are two sets of twins, the four Latimer sisters are as close as can be. Yet these spirited young women each have their own dreams for themselves. They are famous throughout New South Wales for their beauty, wit and ambition, but they are not enthusiastic about the limited prospects life holds for them Together they decide to enroll in a training program for nurses--a new option for women of their time.

Big Little Lies
Liane Moriarty
The novel begins with a murder, but it's not entirely clear who was murdered. It certainly was someone at the fundraiser for the Piriwee Public School. The novel begins six months prior to the violent act and tells the lives of single mother Jane, twice-married Madeline, and Celeste, who secretly suffers from domestic abuse. Popular author Moriarty revitalizes the tired social-issues themed women's fiction genre with wit, emotional depth and fantastic storytelling.

The Rosie Project
Graeme C. Simsion
Don Tillman, an intense, but emotionally challenged geneticist, thinks having women fill out a six-page, double-sided questionnaire before a date is logical and sensible. Rosie Jarman, a spontaneous barmaid, thinks Don should loosen up and learn to live a little. Follow this unlikely pair as they discover romance.

Eyrie
Tim Winton
The story of Tom Keely, a man who's lost his way in middle-age and is now holed up in an apartment at the top of a dingy high-rise, looking down on the world he's fallen out of love with. He's cut himself off, until one day he runs into some neighbors: a woman he used to know  when they were kids, and her introverted young boy. The encounter shakes him up in a way that he doesn't understand. What follows is a heart-stopping, innovative novel, funny, provoking, exhilarating and populated by memorable characters.

Shame and the Captives
Thomas Keneally
A story inspired by true events follows the experiences of a World War II prisoner's wife who makes friends with an Italian radical in the hope of improving her husband's suffering, only to be swept up in a violent prison break. Keneally nicely blends history, romance, and wartime scheming into another wonderful historical fiction novel.