Hello, readers! Welcome to another #5OnMyTBR update. The rule is relatively simple. I just have to pick five books from my to-be-read pile that fit the week’s theme.
This week’s theme: Magical Realism
5OnMyTBR is a bookish meme hosted by E. @ Local Bee Hunter’s Nook where you chose five books from your to-be-read pile that fit that week’s theme. If you’d like more info, head over to the announcement post!
Title: The Ocean at the end of the Lane
Author: Neil Gaiman
Publisher: William Morrow
Publishing Date: 2019
No. of Pages: 324
Synopsis:
This is what he remembers, as he sits by the ocean at the end of the lane:
A dead man on the back seat of the car, and warm milk at the farmhouse.
An ancient little girl, and an old woman who saw the moon being made.
A beautiful housekeeper with a monstrous smile.
And dark forces woken that were best left undisturbed.
They are memories hard to believe, waiting at the edges of things. The recollections of a man who thought he has lost but is now, perhaps, remembering a time when he was saved…
Title: Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands
Author: Jorge Amado
Translator (from Portuguese): Harriet de Onis
Publisher: Avon Books
Publishing Date: May 1988
No. of Pages: 518
Synopsis:
In this extraordinary adventure by Brazil’s foremost novelist, the irrepressible Dona Flor is happy with her new husband, who is kind, considerate, a perfect gentleman. Yet, she has to admit she misses his roguish, passionate predecessor, who expired from his amorous exertions. So, in this land of many gods and occasional miracles, Flor approaches the divine Exu with her dilemma… and before she knows it, she has all any woman could possibly want: two husbands – one living, one dead – each consummately skilled in his own way in the infinite art of love.
Title: The Kingdom of this World
Author: Alejo Carpenter
Translator: Harriet de Onis
Publisher: The Noonday Press
Publishing Date: 1989
No. of Pages: 186
Synopsis:
A few after its liberation from French colonialist rule, Haiti experienced a period of unsurpassed brutality, horror, and superstition under the reign of the black King Henri-Christophe. Through the eyes of the ancient slave Ti-Noel, The Kingdom of This World records the destruction of the black regime – built on the same corruption and contempt for human life that brought down the French – in an orgy of voodoo, race, hatred, erotomania, and fantastic grandeurs of false elegance.
Title: The Law of Love
Author: Laura Esquivel
Publisher: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1996
No. of Pages: 266 pages
Synopsis:
The story is set in Mexico City three centuries hence when humanity was discovered that everyone goes through 14,000 reincarnations in order to achieve a perfect fusion with their twin soul (the ultimate goal of life). Our heroine, Azucena, is an astroanalyst, a sort of highly evolved psychotherapist who, with the help of her Guardian Angel, ministers to the karmically challenged using the power of music to reacquaint her patients with their past lives. As an astroanalyst and an enlightened soul, Azucena has finally been allowed to meet her twin soul, her true love, Rodrigo. But after only one night of supreme passion, the lovers are separated, and Azucena must search of Rodrigo across the galaxy and through 14,000 past lives. She encounters many obstacles and adventures in her search, inadvertently getting involved in a plot by a fraudulent reincarnation of Mother Teresa who wishes to use her false identity to become President of the Planet. Azucena is forced to expose the fraud and replace the capstone on the Temple of Love, destroyed when Cortes conquered Tenochtitlan, which will restore harmony to the galaxy
Title: Dreaming in Cuban
Author: Cristina Garcia
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Publishing Date: 2017
No. of Pages: 245
Synopsis:
Cristina Garcia’s acclaimed book is the haunting, bittersweet story of a family experiencing a country’s revolution and the revelations that follow. The lives of Celia del Pino and her husband, daughters, and grandchildren mirror the magical realism of Cuba itself, a landscape of beauty and poverty, idealism and corruption. Dreaming in Cuban is “a work that possesses both the intimacy of a Chekhov story and the hallucinatory magic of a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez” (The New York Times). In celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the novel’s original publication, this edition features a new introduction by the author.
Title: Orlando, A Biography
Author: Virginia Woolf
Publisher: Vintage Books
Publishing Date: 2004
No. of Pages: 215
Synopsis:
As his tale begins, Orlando is a passionate young nobleman whose days are spent in rowdy revelry, filled with the colourful delights of Queen Elizabeth’s court. By the close, he will have transformed into a modern woman and three centuries will have passed. Orlando is Woolf’s most extraordinary creation, and through him we see an intimate portrait of history in the making.
The Pine-Scented Chronicles 