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: Set in a Big City

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: Them
Author: Joyce Carol Oates
Setting: Detroit, Michigan, USA
Publisher: Modern Library
Publishing Date: 2006
No. of Pages: 538

Synopsis: 

As powerful and relevant today as it was on its initial publication, Them chronicles the tumultuous lives of a family living on the edge of ruin in the Detroit slums, from the 1930s to the 1967 race riots. Praised by The Nation for her “potent, life-gripping imagination,” Joyce Carol Oates traces the aspirations and struggles of Loretta Wendall, a dreamy young mother who is filled with regret by the age of sixteen, and the subsequent destinies of her children, Maureen and Jules, who must fight to survive in a world or violence and danger

Title: Back to Moscow
Author: Guillermo Erades
Setting: Moscow, Russia
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publishing Date: 2016
No. of Pages: 371

Synopsis: 

Tuesday Night: vodka and dancing at the Hungry Duck. Wednesday morning: posing as an expert on Pushkin at the university. Thursday night: more vodka and girl chasing at Propaganda. Friday morning: a hungover tour of Gorky’s house.

Martin, a young doctoral student of literature, comes to Moscow at the turn of the millennium hoping to discover the country of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and his beloved Chekhov. Instead he finds a city turned on its head, where the grimmest vestiges of Soviet life exist side by side with the nonstop hedonism of the newly rich. Along with his hard-living expat friends, Martin spends less and less time on his studies, pursuing instead the Mysterious Russian Soul in the city’s unhinged nightlife scene. But as Martin’s research becomes a quest for existential meaning, love affairs and literature lead to the same hard-won lessons. Russians know: there is more to life than happiness.

Title: Houses
Author: Borislav Pekić
Translator (from Serbian): Bernard Johnson
Setting: Belgrade, Serbia
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Publishing Date: 2016
No. of Pages: 212

Synopsis: 

Building can be seen as a master metaphor for modernity, which some great irresistible force, be it Fascism or Communism or capitalism, is always busy rebuilding, and Houses is a book about a man, Arsenie Negovan, who has devoted his life and his dreams to building.

Bon vivant, Francophile, visionary, Negovan spent the first half of his life building houses he loved and even named – Juliana, Christina, Agatha – while making his hometown of Belgrade into a modern city to be proud of. The second half of his life, after World War II and the Nazi occupation, he has spent in one of those houses, looked after by his wife and a nurse, in hiding. Houses is set on the final day of his life, when Negovan at last ventures forth to see the world as it is.

Negovan is one of the great characters in modern fiction, a man of substance and deluded fantasist, a beguiling visionary and a monster of selfishness, a charmer no matter what. And perhaps he is right to fear that home is only an illusion in our world, or that only in illusion there is home.

Title: Sophie’s Choixe
Author: William Styron
Setting: New York City, USA
Publisher: Random House
Publishing Date: 1979
No. of Pages: 515

Synopsis: 

Stingo came to Brooklyn by way of Virginia and the Marine Corps – with a brief sojourn as a manuscript reader at McGraw-Hill. He settled in Yetta Zimmerman’s pink-painted rooming house, where the rent was cheap enough for a young man with only a few hundred dollars to devote himself to the novel he wanted to write. Sophie and Nathan lived upstairs, as he agonizingly discovered when their rocking bed threatened to collapse the ceiling.

Thus began a strange relationship: Sophie, the Polish Catholic girl whose wrist bore the grim stamp of a concentration camp…. Nathan, her lover, the charismatic Jewish intellectual… and the narrator Stingo, the sex-starved “South’n” boy who was instantly captivated by Sophie’s vulnerable blond beauty.

As Stingo struggles with his book – and tries desperately to cope with his growing but unrequited love for the woman upstairs – he also becomes Sophie’s confidant, irresistibly absorbed in the harrowing story she tells of Nathan’s obsessive jealousy and her own unshakable devotion to him.

And as Nathan and Sophie’s quarrels intensify, and Stingo is drawn even more into her life, she is compelled, bit by bit, to confront her past – a past strewn with death that she alone survived.

Title: The City Always Wins
Author: Omar Robert Hamilton
Setting: Cairo, Egypt
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Publishing Date: 2017
No. of Pages: 307

Synopsis: 

We’ve been doing the same thing for hundreds of years. Marching, fighting, chanting, dying, changing, winning, losing… This time will be different. This time the future can still be made new.

This is a revolution. On the streets of Cairo, a violent uprising is transforming the course of modern history. Mariam and Khalil, two young activists are swept up in the political fervour. Their lives will never be the same again.

Brave, visceral, and electric with tension, Omar Robert Hamilton’s debut novel uniquely captures the feverish intensity of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. From the euphoria of mass protests to the chilling silence of the morgue, The City Always Wins is the only novel that allows readers to piece to the bloody heart of the uprising.

Intensely lyrical, yet uncompromisingly political, Omar Robert Hamilton’s novel will become the defining voice of a revolution that promised so much to so many.

Title: The Japanese Lover
Author: Isabel Allende
Translator (from Spanish): Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson
Setting: San Francisco, California, USA
Publisher: Atria Books
Publishing Date: November 2015
No. of Pages: 322

Synopsis: 

In 1939, as Poland falls under the shadow of the Nazis and the world goes to war, young Alma Belasco’s parents send her overseas to live in safety with an aunt and uncle in their opulent mansion in San Francisco. There she encounters Ichimei Fukuda, the son of the family’s Japanese gardener, and between them a tender love blossoms. Following the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, the two are cruelly pulled apart as Ichimei and his family – like thousands of other Japanese-Americans – are declared enemies and forcibly relocated to internment camps run by the United States government. Throughout their lifetimes, Alma and Ichemei reunite again and again, but theirs is a love that they are forever forced to hide from the world.

Decades later, Alma is nearing the end of her long and eventful life. Irina Bazili, a care worker struggling to come to terms with her own troubled past, meets the elderly woman and her grandson, Seth, at San Francisco’s charmingly eccentric Lark House nursing home. As Irina and Seth forge a friendship, they become intrigued by a series of mysterious gifts and letters sent to Alma, and learn about Ichimei and his extraordinary secret passion that has endured nearly seventy years.

Sweeping through time and spanning generations and continents, The Japanese Lover explores questions of identity, abandonment, redemption, and the unknowable impact of fate on our lives. Written with the same attention to historical detail and keen understanding of her characters that Isabel Allende has been known for since her landmark first novel, The House of the Spirits, The Japanese Lover is a profoundly moving tribute to the constancy of the human heart in a world of unceasing change.