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: Water

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: Water
Author: Ashokamitran
Translator: Lakshmi Homstrom
Publisher: Heinemann Educational
Publishing Date: 1993
No. of Pages: 95

Synopsis: 

Ashokamitran was born in Andhra Pradesh, India, in 1931. One of the country’s most highly regarded writers in Tamil, he is the author of numerous short stories, novellas and several novels.

It is the summer of 1969. In the middle of the worst drought seen in Madras in many years, Jamuna is struggling to hold together the threads of a life on the point of crumbling. Seemingly friendless, manipulated by her love, scorned by her sister Chaya for her emotional weakness, Jamuna soon finds herself in the depths of despair. Water is a modern classic, a curiously cool reflection on the chaos of life in the city.

Title: The Tears of Dark Water
Author: Corban Addison
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Publishing Date: October 13, 2015
No. of Pages: 464

Synopsis: 

Daniel and Vanessa Parker are an American success story. He is a Washington, DC, power broker, and she is a physician with a thriving practice. But behind the gilded facade, their marriage is a shambles, and their teenage son, Quentin, is self-destructing. In desperation, Daniel dusts off a long-delayed dream a sailing trip around the world. Little does he know, the voyage he hopes will save them may destroy them instead.

Title: Open Water
Author: Caleb Azumah Nelson

Synopsis: 

Two young people meet at a pub in South East London. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists – he a photographer, she a dancer – trying to make their mark in a city that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence.

At once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity, Open Water asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body, to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength, to find safety in love, only to lose it. With gorgeous, soulful intensity, Caleb Azumah Nelson has written the most essential British debut of recent years. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: The Covenant of Water
Author: Abraham Verghese

Synopsis: 

A stunning and magisterial new epic of love, faith, and medicine, set in Kerala and following three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret.

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. The family is part of a Christian community that traces itself to the time of the apostles, but times are shifting, and the matriarch of this family, known as Big Ammachi—literally “Big Mother”—will witness unthinkable changes at home and at large over the span of her extraordinary life. All of Verghese’s great gifts are on display in this new work: there are astonishing scenes of medical ingenuity, fantastic moments of humor, a surprising and deeply moving story, and characters imbued with the essence of life.

A shimmering evocation of a lost India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. It is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: The Water Margin: Outlaws of the Marsh
Author: Shi Naian

Synopsis: 

ased upon the historical bandit Song Jiang and his companions, The Water Margin is an epic tale of rebellion against tyranny that will remind Western readers of the English classic Robin Hood and His Merry Men.

This edition of the classic J. H. Jackson translation brings a story that has been inspiring readers for hundreds of years to life for modern audiences. It features a new preface and introduction by Edwin Lowe, which gives the history of the book and puts the story into perspective for today’s readers. First translated into English by Pearl S. Buck in 1933 as All Men Are Brothers, the original edition of the J.H. Jackson translation appeared under the title The Water Margin in 1937. In this updated edition, Edwin Lowe addresses many of the shortcomings found in the original J.H. Jackson translation, and reinserts the grit and flavor of Shuihui Zhuan found in the original Chinese versions, including the sexual seduction, explicit descriptions of brutality, and the profane voices of the lower classes of Song Dynasty China. Similarly, the Chinese deities, Bodhisattvas, gods and demons have reclaimed their true names, as has the lecherous, ill-fated Ximen Qing. This 70-chapter book includes much that was sanitized out of the 1937 publication, giving Anglophone readers the most complete picture to date of this classic Chinese novel.

While Chinese in origin, the themes of The Water Margin are so universal that they have served as a source of inspiration for numerous movies, television shows and video games up to the present day.