Mumbai was once, and still is to many, a mythical city on the Arabian Sea. The myth isn’t one of ancient forests where princes wander and it’s not one of blue gods appearing on battlefields.  Mumbai was once, and still is to many, Bombay and it is in this myth of Bombay as a city of possibilities that Rohinton Mistry establishes in his 1995 novel A Fine Balance. Framed between the year of India’s independence from British rule and the end of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency in 1977, Mistry unfolds the complex lives of four citizens of the city while introducing readers to the unique challenges they face as they attempt to navigate within a changing Indian society.

In 1991 after the colapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba entered an era of economic crisis that came to be known as 'The Special Period in Time of Peace' and eventually simply as 'The Special Period'. Robert Arellano's 2009 Havana Lunar returns readers to this  time with the story of a Havana doctor whose concern for the safty of a young prositute leads him towards one very dark night.