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: Contemporary

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: Beartown
Author: Fredrik Backman
Translator (from Swedish): Neil Smith
Publisher: Washington Square Press
Publishing Date: February 2018 (2016)
No. of Pages: 415

Synopsis: 

A tiny community deep in the forest, Beartown hasn’t been the best at anything in a long time. But down by the lake stands an old ice rink. And, in that ice rink, Kevin, Amat, Benji, and the rest of the town’s junior ice hockey team are about to compete in the national semifinals – and they actually have a shot at winning. All the hopes and dreams of this place now rest on the shoulders of a handful of teenage boys.

Under that heavy burden, the semifinal match becomes the catalyst for a violent act that will leave a young girl traumatized and a town in turmoil.

This is a story about a town and a game, but even more about loyalty, commitment, and the responsibilities of friendship; the people we disappoint even though we love them; and the decisions we make every day that come to define us. In this story of a small forest town, Fredrik Backman has found the entire world.

Title: When We Fell Apart
Author: Soon Wiley
Publisher: Dutton
Publishing Date: 2022
No. of Pages: 353

Synopsis: 

When the Seoul police inform Min that his girlfriend, Yu-jin, has committed suicide, he’s sure it can’t be true. Min, the son of an American father and Korean mother, who always felt “too Korean” to fit in during his childhood in Califonia, has recently moved to Seoul in the hope that exploring his Korean heritage will help him find a sense of purpose. And when he met Yu-jin, a local university student, little did he know that their carefree relationship would set off a chain of events with tragic consequences for them both.

When the Seoul police inform Min that his girlfriend, Yu-jin, has committed suicide, he’s sure it can’t be true. Min, the son of an American father and Korean mother, who always felt “too Korean” to fit in during his childhood in Califonia, has recently moved to Seoul in the hope that exploring his Korean heritage will help him find a sense of purpose. And when he met Yu-jin, a local university student, little did he know that their carefree relationship would set off a chain of events with tragic consequences for them both.

As Yu-jin’s story – a fraught exploration of selfhood, coming-of-age, and family expectations – collides with Min’s, the result is an engrossing page-turner that poses powerful urgent questions about cultural identity, family bonds, secrets, and what it truly means to belong.

Title: Gone Girl
Author: Gillian Flynn
Publisher: Wiedenfield & Nicholson
Publishing Date: 2014
No. of Pages: 463

Synopsis: 

There are two sides to every story…

Who are you?

What have we done to each other?

These are the questions Nick Dunne finds himself asking on the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary, when his wife Amy suddenly disappears. The police suspect Nick. Amy’s friends reveal that she was afraid of him, that she kept secrets from him. He swears it isn’t true. A police examination of his computer shows strange searches. He says they weren’t made by him. And then there are the persistent calls on his mobile phone.

So what did happen to Nick’s beautiful wife?

Title: Such a Fun Age
Author: Kiley Reid
Publisher: Putnam
Publishing Date: 2019
No. of Pages: 305

Synopsis: 

When Emira Tucker is apprehended at a local high-end supermarket for “kidnapping” the white child she’s babysitting, a small crowd gathers, a bystander films everything, and Emira is left furious and humiliated. Her employer, Alix Chamberlain, a feminist entrepreneur known for her confidence-driven brand, resolves to make things right.

But Emira herself is aimless, broke, and wary of Alix’s desire to help. At twenty-five, she is about to lose her health insurance and has no idea what to do with her life. And when the video of Emira unearths someone from Alix’s past, both women find themselves on a crash course that will upend everything they think they know about themselves, and each other.

Title: The Robber Bride
Author: Margaret Atwood
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Publishing Date: November 1993
No. of Pages: 466

Synopsis: 

From the extraordinary imagination of Margaret Atwood, the author of the bestselling The Handmaid’s Tale and Cat’s Eye, comes her most intricate and subversive novel yet.

Roz. Charis, and Tony – war babies all – share a wound, and her name is Zenia. Zenia is beautiful and smart and hungry, by turns manipulative and vulnerable, needy and ruthless, the turbulent center of her own never-ending saga. Zenia entered their lives when they were in college, in the sixties; and over the three decades since, she damaged each of them badly, ensnaring their sympathy, betraying their trust, and treating their men as loot. Then Zenia died, or at any rate, the three women – with much relief – attended her funeral. But as The Robber Bride begins, she’s suddenly alive again, sauntering into the restaurant where they are innocently eating lunch.

In this consistently entertaining and profound new novel, Margaret Atwood reports from the farthest reaches of the war between the sexes, provocatively suggesting that if women are to be equal they must realize that they share with men both the capacity for villainy and the responsibility for moral choice. The group of women and men at the center of this funny and wholly involving story all fall prey to a chillingly recognizable menace, which is given power by their own fantasies and illusions. The Robber Bride is a novel to delight in – for its consummately crafted prose, for its rich and devious humor, and ultimately, for its compassion.

Title: The Hours
Author: Michael Cunningham
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publishing Date: 1998
No. of Pages: 226

Synopsis: 

In The Hours, Michael Cunningham, who is recognized as “one of our very best writers” (Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times), draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters who are struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair.

The novel opens with an evocation of Woolf’s last days before her suicide in 1941, and moves to the stories of two modern American women who are trying to make rewarding lives for themselves in spite of the demands of friends, lovers, and family.

Clarissa Vaughan is a book editor who lives in present-day Greenwich Village; when we meet her, she is buying flowers to display at a party for her friend Richard, an ailing poet who has just won a major literary prize. Laura Brown is a housewife in postwar California who is bringing up her only son and looking for her true life outside of her stifling marriage.

With rare ease and assurance, Cunningham makes the two women’s lives converge with Virginia Woolf’s in an unexpected and heartbreaking way during the party for Richard. As the novel jump-cuts through the twentieth century, every line resonates with Cunningham’s clear, strong, surprisingly lyrical contemporary voice.