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The Hole is a short, intense vignette of an attempt to smuggle drugs into a prison....

Yi Yi is an elegantly constructed portrait of a family in Taipei in the 1990s. It is bookended by a wedding, at which the family matriarch takes ill, and a funeral, at which the family commemorates her death. In between, we witness the characters and the emotional mysteries that they confront—NJ, the quiet, frustrated father; Yang Yang, his inquisitive son; Ting Ting, his teenage daughter, pulled between her neighbor and her neighbor’s boyfriend....

Over the course of five sections, The Enigma of Arrival draws an autobiographical portrait of an unnamed narrator that strongly resembles the author. Like Naipaul, the narrator is ethnically Hindu, raised in Trinidad, and schooled in England....