Friday Finds -- May 14, 2010

Hosted by MizB at Should be reading, this meme asks you what great books did you hear about/discover this past week?

I love doing this meme every week. Among the many books that sneakily jump into my TBR every week, I try to feature the ones that really caught my eye. In a way, it's like choosing a weekly top three. I wonder how many of these books I would rate high after reading. But considering that most, if not all, are recommendations, I would guess, many.

Finding Nouf by Zoë Ferraris

I recently came across this book in Wendy's blog. She had reviewed it last year, but I'm just seeing it.

When sixteen-year-old Nouf goes missing and is found drowned in the desert outside Jeddah, Nayira, the desert guide hired by her prominent family to search for her, feels compelled to find out what really happened.

Gentle, hulking, conscientious Nayir soon finds himself delving into the interior life of a wealthy, protected teenage girl in one of the most rigidly segregated of Middle Eastern societies. To gain access to the world of women, Nayir realizes he will have to join forces with Katya Hijazi, a lab technician at the coroner's office and the fiancée of Nouf's brother. In the course of working with Katya and uncovering the mysteries of the dead girl's mind, Nayir must confront his own desire for female companionship and the limitations imposed by his beliefs.

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Operation Mincemeat by Ben MacIntyre

I hadn't heard of Operation Mincemeat (the real operation not the book) before. It definitely seems an interesting tactic to use, with an complete conniving feel to it. Using a dead body to divert the Nazis into a different battlefield, during World War 2, allowed the Allied armies to invade Sicily.

One April morning in 1943, a sardine fisherman spotted the corpse of a British soldier floating in the sea off the coast of Spain and set in train a course of events that would change the course of the Second World War. Operation Mincemeat was the most successful wartime deception ever attempted, and certainly the strangest. It hoodwinked the Nazi espionage chiefs, sent German troops hurtling in the wrong direction, and saved thousands of lives by deploying a secret agent who was different, in one crucial respect, from any spy before or since: he was dead. His mission: to convince the Germans that instead of attacking Sicily, the Allied armies planned to invade Greece. The brainchild of an eccentric RAF officer and a brilliant Jewish barrister, the great hoax involved an extraordinary cast of characters including a famous forensic pathologist, a gold-prospector, an inventor, a beautiful secret service secretary, a submarine captain, three novelists, a transvestite English spymaster, an irascible admiral who loved fly-fishing, and a dead Welsh tramp.

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Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok

I believe I have come across this book previously, but for some reason, was hooked by it only last week. A friend of mine in Goodreads recommended this book, and its synopsis does sound very promising.

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. Disguising the more difficult truths of her life-like the staggering degree of her poverty, the weight of her family's future resting on her shoulders, or her secret love for a factory boy who shares none of her talent or ambition-Kimberly learns to constantly translate not just her language but herself back and forth between the worlds she straddles.

Check out what others discovered here!

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