Here’s the second batch of my book purchases from the ongoing 2023 Big Bad Wolf book fair. The two-part book haul also comprises all my book haul for July. Part II, by the way, features works of fiction written by non-American and non-British writers, or at least writers with other heritages. Happy weekend reading everyone!
Title: Cloudstreet
Author: Tim Winton
Publisher: Picador Classic
Publishing Date: 2015 (1991)
No. of Pages: 431
Synopsis:
Will you look at us by the river! The whole restless mob of us on spread blankets in the dreamy briny sunshine skylarking and chiacking about for one day, one clear, clean sweet day in a good world in the midst of our living.
No. 1 Cloudstreet: a broken-down house on the wrong side of the tracks, a place teeming with memories, with shudders and shadows and spirits. From separate catastrophes, two families – the Pickles and Lambs – flee to the city and find themselves thrown together, forced to start their lives afresh. As they roister and rankle, the place that began as a roof over their heads becomes a home for their hearts.
Winner of Australia’s prestigious Miles Franklin Award, Cloudstreet is Tim Winton’s great family drama, a twenty-year story of life and love, full of boisterous energy, joy and heartbreak. His visceral evocation of the Australian landscape is nowhere more extraordinary than in this classic.
Title: TransAtlantic
Author: Colum McCann
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Publishing Date: 2013
No. of Pages: 298
Synopsis:
1919. Emily Ehrlich watches as two young airmen, Alcock and Brown, emerge from the carnage of the First World War to pilot the very first non-stop transatlantic flight from Newfoundland to the west of Ireland. Among the letters being carried on the aircraft is one which will not be opened for almost a hundred years.
1845. Frederick Douglass, a black American slave, lands in Ireland to champion ideas of democracy and freedom, only to find a famine unfurling at his feet. On his travels he inspires a young maid to go to New York to embrace a free world, but America does not always fulfill its promises for her. From the fierce battlefields of the Civil War to the ice lakes of northern Missouri, it is her youngest daughter Emily who eventually finds her way back to Ireland.
1998. Senator George Mitchell criss-crosses the ocean in search of an elusive Irish peace. How many more bereaved mothers and grandmothers must he meet before an agreement can be reached?
Elegantly stitching these stories together, National Book Award-winning author Colum McCann explores the fine line between what is real and what is imagined, between fiction and non-fiction, between promise and memory. Can we pass from the new world to the old? How does the past shape the future? How does even the most unassuming moment of grace have a ripple effect on our lives? Intricately crafted, poetic and deeply affecting, TransAtlantic is an outstanding act of literary bravura.
Title: How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone
Author: Saša Stanišić
Translator (from German): Anthea Bell
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicholson
Publishing Date: 2008 (2006)
No. of Pages: 277
Synopsis:
Aleksandar is Comrade-in-Chief of fishing, the best magician in the non-aligned States and painter of unfinished things. He knows the first chapter of Marx’s Das Kapital by heart but spends most of his time playing football in the Bosnian town of Višegrad on the banks of the river Drina. When his grandfather, a master storyteller, dies of the fastest -heart-attack-in-the-world while watching Carl Lewis’s record, Aleksandar promises to carry on the tradition.
However when the shadow of war spreads to Višegrad, the world as he knows it stops. Suddenly it is not important how much a spider’s life weighs, or why Marko’s horse is related to Superman. Suddenly it is important to have the right name and to pretend that the little Muslim girl, Asija, is his sister. Then Aleksandar’s parents decide to flee to Germany and he must leave his new friend behind. But on the tenth anniversary of Grandpa Slavko’s death, Aleksandar decides to return to Višegrad, to find out what happened to Asija and the life he left behind.
Full of mesmerising fast turns, dynamic leaps, and boundless humuor, How the Solider Repairs the Gramophone is a highly inventive debut novel about the catastrophe of war and the power of words to make life anew.
Title: The Prophets of Eternal Fjord
Author: Kim Leine
Translator (from Danish): Martin Aitken
Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publishing Date: 2015 (2012)
No. of Pages: 559
Synopsis:
From the swarming streets of Copenhagen to the frozen villages of Greenland, The Prophets of Eternal Fjord is a grand, magisterial story of epic proportion. Earning rave reviews and scores of readers across the world, Kim Leine’s masterpiece – sweeping across the sea in a whaler and scurrying, panicked, from the Great Fire of 1795 – arrives on American shores erupting with pathos, lust, faith lost and found, and a cast of characters clinging to life amid persecution and calamity.
Idealistic, foolhardy Morten Falck, the hapless hero, is a newly ordained priest sailing to Greenland in 1787 to convert the Inuit to the Danish church. He’s rejected the prospect of a sleepy posting in a local parish and instead departs for the forsaken Sukkertoppen colony, where he will endeavor to convert the locals A town battered by unremittingly harsh winters and simmering with the threat of dissent, it is a far cry from the parish he envisioned; natives from neighboring villages have unified to reject colonial rule and establish their own settlement atop Eternal Fjord. A bumbling and at times terrifically destructive mix of Shakespeare’s Falstaff and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Arthur Dimmesdale, he’s woefully ill prepared to confront this new sect. Torn between his instinctive compassion for the rebel congregation perched atop Eternal Fjord and his duty to the church, Falck is forced to decide where he belongs. His exploits in this brutal backwater include an accidental explosion after a night curled around a keg, a botched surgery, a love affair with a solitary and fatalistic widow, and an apprenticeship with an eager young scholar that ends in tragedy.
Based on authentic events in the 1780s and ’90s, The Prophets of Eternal Fjord moves from the quiet rooms of the Copenhagen bourgeoisie to the stark, hardscrabble village of the Fjord where Falck finds himself – surprisingly – at home. Leine’s textured, earthy prose evokes the sting of the cold, the itch of the wool, and the burn of the roughest swig of aquavit. In gritty detail, Leine reveals the corrosive effects of colonial rule – both on the colonized, bite=terly ground down as they are, and on the colonizers, compromised and corrupted by their baseless power.
In rich, Dickensian descriptions, Leine charts the tragic events that intertwine seemingly disparate lives, illuminating the brutal and tender impulses of those seeking redemption and the shifting line between religion and mysticism. The Prophets of Eternal Fjord is a visceral panorama of a fragile colony caught in the throes of history, making the American debut of a major international writer.
Title: What We Become
Author: Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Translator (from Spanish): Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia
Publisher: Atria Books
Publishing Date: June 2016 (2012)
No. of Pages: 453
Synopsis:
A sweeping tale of love, adventure, and intrigue from the acclaimed author of The Queen of the South and The Club Dumas.
In 1928, aboard the Cap Polonio – a lavish transatlantic cruise ship bound for Buenos Aires – Max Costa locks eyes with Mecha Inzunza across the first-class ballroom. They are an unlikely match. He is a thief, sleek and refined, hired to dance with unaccompanied passengers. She is the elegant wife of an accomplished composer, accustomed only to the luxuries of the elite. But as they embrace in a fiery tango, a steamy and dangerous love affair ignites – following them from the ship’s gentle sways in the Atlantic night to the seedy decadence of Buenos Aires. Yet as quickly as their affair begins, the two lovers are torn apart.
In Nice, 1937, Max and Mecha’s lives intersect for a second time. Although much has changed over the last nine years, they rekindle their dalliance with ease. But in the wake of a perilous mission gone awry, Mecha looks after her charming paramour until a deadly encounter with a Spanish spy forces Max to flee, leaving them uncertain as to whether their paths will ever cross again.
Now, decades later in Sorrento at the height of the Cold War, Max once again runs into trouble – and Mecha. The years have taken their toll on Max Costa, but age hasn’t diminished his passion for her. The opportunity to succumb to their undeniable attraction has arrived at last, but with KGB agents on Max’s trail, the small glimmer of hope becomes increasingly dim.
A mesmerizing tale of love and adventure, espionage and honor, What We Become is Arturo Pérez-Reverte at his finest. This richly rendered love story opens a window into the lives of his always unforgettable characters with elegant prose reminiscent of his beloved novel The Club Dumas. Sweeping through time and across borders, What We Become proves that love, much like a great novel, is timeless and enduring.
Title: 2017
Author: Olga Slavnikova
Translator (from Russian): Marian Schwartz
Publisher: Overlook/Duckworth
Publishing Date: 2010 (2006)
No. of Pages: 414
Synopsis:
In the year 2017 in Russia – exactly 100 years after the revolution – poets and writers are obsolete, class distinctions are painfully sharp, and spirits intervene in the lives of humans from their home high in the mythical Riphean Mountains.
Professor Anfilogov, a wealthy and emotionless man, sets out on an expedition to unearth priceless rubies that no one else has been able to locate. Young Krylov, a talented gem cutter who Anfilogov had taken under his wing, is seeing off his mentor at the train station when he is drawn to a mysterious stranger who calls herself Tanya. Meanwhile, Anfilogov’s expedition reveals ugly truths about man’s disregard for nature, and the disasters stemming from insatiable greed.
Olga Slavnikova stuns us with this gripping tale of love, murder and obsession, which takes up the mantle of Ruassi’s unrivaled literary heritage.
Title: Infinite Riches
Author: Ben Okri
Publisher: Phoenix
Publishing Date: 1999 (1998)
No. of Pages: 394
Synopsis:
This is a startling novel about different kinds of riches and different forms of power. It opens another chapter in the adventures of Azaro, the celebrated spirit-child of The Famished Road, winner of the Booker Prize. By turns thunderous and tender, it will resonate in the mind and heart of the reader for a long time.
Title: Seventeen
Author: Hideo Yokoyama
Translator (from Japanese): Louise Heal Kawai
Publisher: Riverrun
Publishing Date: 2018 (2003)
No. of Pages: 394
Synopsis:
Five hundred and twenty people died on that mountain. That sparkling mountain.
1985. Kazumasa Yuuki, a seasoned reporter at the North Kanto Times, runs a daily gauntlet against the power struggles and office politics that plague its newsroom. But when an air disaster of unprecedented scale occurs on the paper’s doorstep, its staff are united by an unimaginable horror, and a once-in-a-lifetime scoop.
2002. Seventeen years later, Yuuki remembers the adrenaline-fuelled, emotionally charged seven days that changed his and his colleagues’ lives. He does so while making good on a promise he made that fateful week – one that holds the key to its last unsolved mystery, and represents Yuuki’s final, unconquered fear.
Title: America is Not the Heart
Author: Elaine Castillo
Publisher: Atlantic Fiction
Publishing Date: 2018
No. of Pages: 406
Synopsis:
How many lives can one person lead in a single lifetime? When Hero De Vera arrives in America, disowned by her parents in the Philippines, she’s already on her third. Her uncle, Pol, who has offered her a fresh start and a place to stay, knows not to ask about the first and second, and his younger wife, Paz, has learned enough about the might and secrecy of the De Vera family to keep her head down. Only their seven-year-old daughter, Roni, asks Hero why her hands seem to scream with hurt at the steering wheel of the car she drives to collect her from school, and only Rosalyn, the fierce but open-hearted beautician, has any hope of bringing Hero back from the dead.
Title: Radiance of Tomorrow
Author: Ishmael Beah
Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books
Publishing Date: 2014
No. of Pages: 240
Synopsis:
Each story beings and ends with a woman, a mother, a grandmother, a girl, a child. Every story is a birth…
So beings Radiance of Tomorrow, Ishmael Beah’s first novel, one dogged by memories of horror bug glimmering with an improbable ope. When Beah’s memoir, A Long Way Gone, was published in 2007, it soared to the top of bestseller lists, becoming an instant classic: a harrowing account of Sierra Leone’s civil war and the fate of child soldiers a book that “everyone in the world should read” (Carolyn See, The Washington Post). Now Beah, whom Dave Eggers has called “arguably the most read African writer in contemporary literature,” has returned with an affecting, tender parable about postwar life in those regions of Africa still reeling from conflict.
At the center of Radiance of Tomorrow are Benjamin and Bokckarie, two longtime friends who return to their hometown, Imperi, after a devastating civil war. The village is in ruins, the ground covered in bones and drenched in deep despair. The war may be over, but the denizens of Imperi are not spared the dangers that hover over them, menacing as vengeful ghosts. As more villagers begin to come back, Benhamin and Bokarie try to forge a new community by taking up their former posts as teachers, but they’re beset by obstacles: a scarcity of food; a rash of murders, thievery, rape, and retaliation; and the depredations of a foreign mining company intent on sullying the town’s water supply and blocking its paths with electric wires. As Benjamin and Bockarie search for a way to restore order, they’re forced to reckon with the uncertainty of their past and future alike.
With the gentle lyricism of a dream and the moral clarity of a fable, Radiance of Tomorrow is a powerful novel about preserving what means the most to us, even in uncertain times. If Long Way Gone taught us to mourn the crimes of yesterday, Radiance of Tomorrow introduces us to a people who must survive their guilt and accept tomorrow, with all its promise – and radiance.
Title: Hummingbird’s Daughter
Author: Luis Alberto Urrea
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Publishing Date: 2011 (2005)
No. of Pages: 499
Synopsis:
Miracles and passion abound in this mesmerizing novel – everywhere hailed as a masterwork – the story of a young woman whose gifts as a healer lend her the aura of a saint, and who must come to terms with a surprising destiny as all of Mexico rises in revolution, crying out her name.
Title: The Pact We Made
Author: Layla Alammar
Publisher: The Borough Press
Publishing Date: 2019
No. of Pages: 274
Synopsis:
Dahlia has two lives. In one, she is a young woman with a good job, great friends and a busy social life. I the other, she is an unmarried daughter living at home, struggling with a burgeoning anxiety disorder and a deeply buried secret: a violent betrayal too shameful to speak of.
With her thirtieth birthday fast approaching, pressure from her mother to accept a marriage proposal begins to strain the family. As her two lives start to collide and fracture, all Dahlia can think of is escape: something that seems impossible when she can’t even leave the country without her father’s consent.
But what if Dahlia does have a choice? What if all she needs is the courage to make it?
Set in contemporary Kuwait, The Pact We Made is a deeply affecting and timely debut about family, secrets and one woman’s search for a different life.
The Pine-Scented Chronicles 