After three years of not holding a physical book fair, the Big Bad Wolf is finally back in Manila. One of the biggest annual book fairs, the Big Bad Wolf sale features over two million books across over 33,000 titles. One will never run out of books to choose from. And because it is a book fair, I am not going to miss out. I have been waiting for the book fair. Compared to prior editions, the majority of the books I purchased were titles written by writers unfamiliar to me. There were still some familiar names such as Ben Okri, Colum McCann, and Arturo Pérez-Reverte. Without further ado, here’s the first batch of my Big Bad Wold haul. This batch features works of American and British writers.
Happy weekend reading everyone!
Title: Regeneration
Author: Pat Barker
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 2008 (1991)
No. of Pages: 250
Synopsis:
Craiglockhart War Hospital, Scotland, 1917, where army psychiatrist William Rivers is treating shell-shocked soldiers. Under his care are the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, as well as mute Billy Prior, who is only able to communicate by means of pencil and paper. Rivers’s job is to make the men in his charge healthy enough to fight. Yet the closer he gets to mending his patients’ minds, the harder becomes every decision to send them back to the horrors of the front…
Regeneration is the classic exploration of how the traumas of war brutalized a generation of young men.
Title: The Eye in the Door
Author: Pat Barker
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 2008 (1993)
No. of Pages: 277
Synopsis:
London, 1918. Billy Prior is working for Intelligence in the Ministry of Munitions. But his private encounters with women and men – pacifists, objectors, homosexuals – conflict with his duties as a soldier, and it is not long before his sense of himself fragments and breaks down. Forced to consult the man who helped him before – army psychiatrists William Riers – Prior must confront his inability to be the dutiful soldier his superiors wish him to be…
The Eye in the Door is a heart-rending study of the contradictions of war and of those forced to live through it.
Title: Manhattan Beach
Author: Jennifer Egan
Publisher: Scribner
Publishing Date: 2018 (2017)
No. of Pages: 433
Synopsis:
Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to visit Dexter Styles, a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her family. She is mesmerized by the sea beyond the house and by some charged mystery between the two men. Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Naval Yard as the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. One evening at a nightclub, she meets Dexter Styles again and begins to understand the complexity of her father’s life, the reasons he might have vanished.
With the atmosphere of a noir thriller, Manhattan Beach is a deft, dazzling propulsive exploration of a transformative moment in American history from one of the great writers of our time.
Title: Cities of the Plain
Author: Cormac McCarthy
Publisher: Picador
Publishing Date: 1999 (1998)
No. of Pages: 294
Synopsis:
In Cities of the Plain, two men marked by the boyhood adventures of All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing now stand together, between their vivid pasts and uncertain futures, to confront a country changing beyond recognition.
In the fall o f1952, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham are cowboys on a New Mexico ranch encroached upon from the north by the military. On the southern horizon are the mountains of Mexico, where one of the men is drawn again and again, in this story of friendships and passion, to a love as dangerous as it is inevitable.
Title: Transit
Author: Rachel Cusk
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publishing Date: 2017 (2016)
No. of Pages: 260
Synopsis:
In the wake of her family’s collapse, a writer and her two young sons move to London. The process of this upheaval is the catalyst for a number of transitions – personal, moral, artistic, and practical – as she endeavors to construct a new reality for herself and her children. In the city, she is made to confront aspects of living that she has, until now avoided, and to consider questions of vulnerability and power, death and renewal, in what becomes her struggle to reattach herself to, and believe in, life.
Filtered through the impersonal gaze of its keenly intelligent protagonist, Transit sees Rachel Cusk delve deeper into the themes first raised in her critically acclaimed novel Outline and offers up a penetrating and moving reflection on childhood and fate, the value of suffering, the moral problems of personal responsibility, and the mystery of change.
In this second book of a precise, short, yet epic cycle, Cusk describes the most elemental experiences, the liminal qualities of life. She captures with unsettling restraint and honesty the longing to both inhabit and feel one’s life, and the wrenching ambivalence animating our desire to feel real.
Title: Saint X
Author: Alexis Schaitkin
Publisher: Celadon Books
Publishing Date: February 2020
No. of Pages: 340
Synopsis:
Claire Thomas is only seven years old when her college-age sister, Alison, disappears on the last night of their family vacation at a resort on the Caribbean Island of Saint X. Several days later, Alison’s body is found in a remote spot on a nearby cay, and two local men – employees at the resort – are arrested. But the evidence is slim, the timeline against it, and the men are soon released. The story turns into national tabloid news, a lurid mystery that will go unsolved. For Claire and her parents, there is only the return home to broken lives.
Years later, Claire is living and working in New York City when a brief but fateful encounter brings her together with Clive Richardson, one of the men originally suspected of murdering her sister. It is a moment that sets Claire on an obsessive pursuit of the truth – not only to find out what happened the night of Alison’s death but also to answer the elusive question: Who exactly was her sister? At seven, Claire had been barely old enough to know her: a beautiful, changeable, provocative girl of eighteen at a turbulent moment of identity formation.
As Claire doggedly shadows Clive, hoping to gain his trust, waiting for the slip that will reveal the truth, an unlikely attachment develops between them, two people whose lives were forever marked by the same tragedy.
For readers of Emma Cline’s The Girls and Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, Saint X is a flawlessly drawn and deeply moving story that culminates in an emotionally powerful ending.
Title: Chocolat
Author: Joanne Harris
Publisher: Black Swan
Publishing Date: 2019 (1999)
No. of Pages: 372
Synopsis:
Try me… Test me… Taste me
In the small French village of Lansquenet, nothing much has changed in a hundred years. Then an exotic stranger, Vianne Rocher, blows in on the changing wind with her small daughter, and opens a chocolate boutique directly opposite the church. Soon the villagers cannot keep away, for Vianne can divine their most hidden desires.
But it’s the beginning of Lent, the season of abstinence, and Father Reynaud denounces her as a serious moral danger to his flock. Perhaps even a with…
It is twenty years since Joanne Harris first wrote about Vianne Rocher in the much-loved Chocolat. She returned to Vianne’s story in The Lollipop Shoes and Peaches for Monsieur Le Curé, and now in her new novel The Strawberry Thief.
Title: You Don’t Have to Live Like This
Author: Benjamin Markovits
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Publishing Date: 2015
No. of Pages: 391
Synopsis:
Would people like you move to Detroit?
Ten years out of Yale, with an extra degree from Oxford, Greg Marnier heads for his college reunion, jetlagged and drunk, where he bumps into an old friend who offers him an extraordinary way out.
Robert James, wealthy and influential, a success story of the dotcom bubble, wants to become a player on the political stage. His plan: to buy up several abandoned neighbourhoods in Detroit – the poster child for urban decline – and build a new American from their boarded-up ruins. For a small investment, Marnier can turn himself into a twenty-first-century pioneer. But the realities of life on America’s urban frontier soon become apparent..
For every urban misfit who’s come for a fresh start there’s a native Detroiter whose patch is being swallowed up by the new colonials. Marnier finds himself caught in the middle of everyone else’s battles – between local and outsider, rich and poor, black and white – until an accident forces him to take sides.
YOU DON’T HAVE TO LIVE LIKE THIS offers a stark vision of disaster-porn capitalism in the wake of America’s personality crisis by one of the most accomplished and lauded literary novelists of his generation.
The Pine-Scented Chronicles 
I miss this! I wish I can go before 3 July.
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