Books like Touching Earth by Rani Manicka

The God of Small Things chronicles the upended childhood of fraternal twins in India, exploring love, caste, and the impact of small moments on fate.

Balram Halwai rises from servant to entrepreneur, revealing the brutal path of ambition and survival in modern India.

A former Japanese POW survivor in post-war Malaya journeys to the secluded Garden of Evening Mists to learn from a reclusive gardener, uncovering secrets of war and forgiveness amid the country's turbulent fight for independence.

Under the fading light of the Chinese emperors and the waning British Empire, a young man’s desperate quest amid World War II reveals loyalty, betrayal, and the fragile ties of a racially mixed Malaysian society.

An undercover reporter follows a celebrity into rehab to uncover juicy gossip about her personal life.

In this book, collected from the statements and writings of the Indians themselves, are recorded the abiding values of Indian life and the tragic history of a people.

From among the many books written by Holocaust survivors, only a handful--like those of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel--have entered literature to become part of the testimony to the darkest time in our century. They are now joined by a woman, a survivor of Birkenau and Auschwitz, with this powerful, profoundly moving memoir. Giuliana Tedeschi was a young woman from Turin's Jewish intellectual community when she was deported to Birkenau in April 1944. How she summoned all. Her resources to remain human and alive is the subject of this remarkable story, which records not so much the horror around her as the struggle within--the struggle with her spiritual resources. This is a woman's story, seen and felt through a woman's sensibility. It is an account of the destruction of feminine personality, the loss of the body's rhythms, of intimacy, beauty, and the sense of self. What is left is only memory, the acting out of old gestures: pushing a. Baby carriage, rocking an imaginary child. These are the tiny wisps of hope keeping her and her fellow inmates alive from one moment to the next. Yet the camp forces the prisoners also to be ruthless with their most intimate affections lest an unguarded remembrance of their children or husbands leave them vulnerable to despair. What makes this account especially moving are the moments that reaffirm what it means to be human in the face of the abominations of camp. Life--the sight of a starlit sky, a luminous summer sunset as the inmates return from labor in the evening, the harmonious gestures and wild, untamed faces of the girls deftly hauling sewage. What prevails miraculously, setting this book apart from the recollections of men, is a woman's frank love of the body and the senses, a tight bond with the world of feelings, with imagination and dreams. This is the true dimension of this book's inspirational power.