Hello, readers! Welcome to another #5OnMyTBR update. The rule is relatively simple. I have to pick five books from my to-be-read pile that fit the week’s theme.

This week’s theme: Title Starting with a ‘G’

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 General in His Labyrinth
Author: Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Translator (from Spanish): Edith Grossman
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 1991
No. of Pages: 268

Synopsis: 

“Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s most political novel is the tragic story of General Simon Bolivar, the man who tried to unite a continent.” Bolivar, known in six Latin American countries as the Liberator, is one of the most revered heroes of the Western hemisphere; in Garcia Marquez’s reimagining he is magnificently flawed as well. The novel follows Bolivar as he takes his final journey in 1830 down the Magdalena River toward the sea, revisiting the scenes of his former glory and lamenting his lost dream of an alliance of American nations. Forced from power, dogged by assassins, and prematurely aged and wasted by a fatal illness, the General is still a remarkably vital and mercurial man. He seems to remain alive by the sheer force of will that led him to so many victories in the battlefields and love affairs of his past. As he wanders in the labyrinth of his failing powers – and still-powerful memories – he defies his impending death until the last. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: Gorky Park
Author: Martin Cruz Smith
Publisher: Random House
Publishing Date: 1981
No. of Pages: 365

Synopsis: 

Once in a long while a novel appears whose plot is so original, atmosphere so authentic, characters so vivid, execution so skillful and premise so true that it reverberates long after the reader has finished its last page. Gorky Park is such a novel.

When three mutilated bodies are discovered in the deep snow of Moscow’s Gorky Park, and chief Homicide Investigator Arkady Renko is beaten to the site by a KGB agent, Major Pribluda, he knows that these are no ordinary murders. As head of the Homicide Department of the Moscow Town Prosecutor’s office, Arkady’s cases generally are typically Russian (which is to say that they involve approximately equal doses of vodka, jealousy, boredom and despair). Usually, too, the KGB leave Arkady alone; it is understood that his job consists of picking up the everyday corpse, while political crimes are left to them.

But these victims, Arkady soon realizes, are part of a seemingly motiveless crime both ruthless and bizarre. And though his every move in the case is monitored by the KGB, he is puzzled that they don’t take on the case themselves, especially when, strangely, a New York City detective obsessed with avenging one of the victims beats Arkady almost to death, and a powerful American businessman who basks in a luxurious bathhouse with the Kremlin’s appratchiks also appears to be implicated in the brutal murders. Even more unsettling to Arkady is his interrogation of Irina, a dissident at Mosfilm, the Soviet film studio. He falls in love with her, even though he cannot trust anyone in an investigation that reaches to the highest levels of the Communist hierarchy.

Arkady is an anomaly in Soviet society: too vigorous in his pursuit of justice, too intelligent to accept Party doublethink, too cynical to believe that there is a happy ending for someone like himself in such a world, and too sensitive and honest to be able to avoid falling in love even when it clearly will be to his cost. Finally, he is too brilliant an investigator not to solve the Gorky Park murders, though the personal price he pays is devastating, and though the deaths reveal more corruption in Soviet – and American – society than he had thought possible.

Title: The Guide
Author: R.K. Narayan
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 1985
No. of Pages: 220

Synopsis: 

Release from jail, Raju – once India’s most corrupt tourist-guide – takes refuge in an abandoned temple. A peasant mistakes him for a holy man, and gradually, reluctantly, Raju begins to play the part. Villagers bring him offerings; he even grows a magnificent beard. Then God Himself decides to put Raju’s new holiness to the test. . . .

Title: The Girl with All the Gifts
Author: M.R. Carey
Publisher: Orbit
Publishing Date: April 2015
No. of Pages: 403

Synopsis: 

Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class.

When they come for her, Sergeant Parks keeps his gun pointing at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don’t like her. She jokes that she won’t bite. But they don’t laugh.

Title: Gilead
Author: Marilynne Robinson
Publisher: Picador
Publishing Date: 2020 (2004)
No. of Pages: 247

Synopsis: 

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Gilead is the second novel by Marilynne Robinson, one of our finest writers. It is a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that its narrator loves passionately, and from which he will soon part.

In 1956, toward the end of his life, the Reverend John Ames begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowa preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and went west to Kansas to fight for abolition. He preached men into the Civil War, then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, after losing his right eye in battle.

Reverend Ames writes about the tension between his father – an ardent pacifist – and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. He tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, bonds that have been tested in his tender but strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend’s wayward son.

This is also the tale of another remarkable vision – not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life s a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames’s soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.

Title: The Good Muslim
Author: Tahmima Anam
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Publishing Date: 2011
No. of Pages: 297

Synopsis: 

In the dying days of a brutal civil war in Bangladesh, Sohail Haque stumbles upon an abandoned building. Inside he finds a young woman whose story will haunt him for a lifetime to come.

Almost a decade later, Sohail’s sister, Maya, returns home after a long absence to find her beloved brother transformed. While Maya has stuck to her revolutionary ideals, Sohail has shunned his old life to become a charismatic religious leader. And when Sohail decides to send his son to a madrasa, the conflict between brother and sister comes to a devastating climax.

The Good Muslim is an epi about faith, family, the rise of religious fundamentalism, and the long shadow of war from prizewinning Bangladeshi novelist Tahmima Anam.