Kao, Emily, ESL Teacher

1. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

2. Little Bee by Chris Cleave

Two women collide lives on a beach in Nigeria. One must make a terrible choice. Two years later, they meet again and the story starts ...

3. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

Well written, multi‐layered short stories with issues that leave you thinking. Arranged marriages, cultural clashes, and universal themes of how we treat each other. A Pulitzer Prize winner.

4. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez

Uprooted from their family home in the Dominican Republic, the four Garcia sisters arrive in New York City to find a life far different from the genteel existence of maids, manicures, and extended family they left behind. What they have lost ‐ and what they find ‐ is revealed in the fifteen interconnected stories.

5. House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus

In this riveting novel of almost unbearable suspense, three fragile yet determined people become dangerously entangled in a relentlessly escalating crisis, including Colonel Behrani, once a wealthy man in Iran, who is now a struggling immigrant willing to bet everything he has to resotre his family's dignity.

6. Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok

When Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to Brooklyn squalor, she quickly begins a secret double life: exceptional schoolgirl during the day, Chinatown sweatshop worker in the evenings.

7. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Amir ́s father dies in the U.S. and Amir receives a letter from his father ́s most trusted business partner and, for a time, Amir ́s surrogate father, which makes Amir return, alone, to a Taliban‐dominated Afghanistan in search of the truth about himself and his family, and finally, a sort of redemption.

8. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

A story set against the volatile events of Afghanistan's last thirty years, from the Soviet invasion to the reign of the Taliban to post‐Taliban rebuilding, that puts the violence, fear, hope and faith of this country in intimate, human terms.

9. The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout

This novel poses a major question: Do you understand that other guy, that other woman? Are you sure?

1. One Classroom, Many Worlds Teaching and Learning in the Cross­Cultural Classroom by Jacklyn Clayton
This book will leave you with a newfound appreciation for culture and diversity. Each chapter highlights very pertinent and powerful issues facing the rapid demographic shifts that are happening in today's schools.

2. Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Ayaan Hirsi Ali tells her astonishing life story, from her traditional Muslim childhood in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and Kenya, to her intellectual awakening and activism in the Netherlands, and her current life under armed guard in the West.

3. A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story by Qais Akbar Omar

4. Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson

Three Cups of Tea combines adventure with a celebration of the humanitarian spirit.