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: Animal

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: The Leopard
Author: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Translator: Archibald Colquhoun
Publisher: Harvill
Publishing Date: 1992
No. of Pages: 190

Synopsis: 

In the spring of 1860, Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, still rules over thousands of Sicilian acres and hundreds of subjects in mingled splendour and squalor. But echoes of the new political movements on the Italian mainland are already being heard. Garibaldi is about to arrive; a revolution is about to begin. The Leopard is about to change…

Title: The Cat Inside
Author: William S. Burroughs
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 2002
No. of Pages: 94

Synopsis: 

Originally published as a limited-edition volume, The Cat Inside is William S. Burrough’s moving and witty discourse on cats, one that combines deadpan routines and ream passages with a heartwarming account of his unexpected friendships with the many cats he has known. It is also a meditation on the long, mysterious relationship between cats and their human hosts, which Burroughs traces back to the Egyptian cult of the “animal other.” With its street sense, arcane erudition, and whiplash prose, The Cat Inside is a genuine revelation for Burroughs fans and cat lovers alike.

Title: Then the Fish Swallowed Him
Author: Amir Ahmadi Arian
Publisher: HarperVia
Publishing Date: 2021
No. of Pages: 275

Synopsis: 

A bus driver in politically fraught Tehran, Yunus Turabi avoids confrontation, but everyone has their breaking point. Yunus has reached his. Handcuffed and blindfolded, he arrives at the infamous Evin prison. Inside, he meets Hajj Saeed, his personal interrogator. As a cat-and-mouse mind game unfolds, and as Yunus struggles to stay one step ahead of Saeed, he must decide to keep on fighting or submit to the system of lies that upholds the power of those in charge.

Title: When We Were Birds
Author: Ayanna Lloyd Banwo
Publisher: Doubleday
Publishing Date: 2022
No. of Pages: 288

Synopsis: 

A mystic love story set in Trinidad, Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s radiant debut introduces two unforgettable outsiders brought together by their connection with the dead.

In the old house on a hill, where the city meets the rain forest, Yejide’s mother is dying. She is leaving behind a legacy that now passes to Yejide: one St. Bernard woman in every generation must shepherd the city’s souls into the afterlife. But after years of suffering her mother’s neglect and bitterness, Yejide is looking for a way out.

Raised in the countryside by a devout mother, Darwin has always abided by the ancient Rastafarian vow not to interact with the dead. He has never been to a funeral, much less seen a dead body. But when the only job he can find is gravedigging, he must betray the life his mother built for him in order to provide for them both. Newly shorn of his dreadlocks and his past, and determined to prove himself, Darwin finds himself adrift in a city electric with possibility and danger.

Yejide and Darwin will meet inside the gates of Didelis, an old and sprawling cemetery, where the dead lie uneasy in their graves and a reckoning with fate beckons them both. A masterwork of lush imagination and exuberant storytelling, When We Were Birds is a spellbinding and hopeful novel about inheritance, loss, and love’s seismic power to heal.

Title: The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane
Author: Lisa See
Publisher: Scribner
Publishing Date: 2017
No. of Pages: 364

Synopsis: 

In their remote Chinese mountain village, Li-yan and her family align their lives around the seasons and the farming of tea. For the Akha people, ensconced in ritual and routine, life goes on as it has for generations – until a stranger appears at the village gate in a jeep, the first automobile any of the villagers has ever seen.

The stranger’s arrival marks the entrance of the modern world in the lives of the Akha people. Slowly, Li-yan, one of the few educated girls on her mountain, begins to reject the customs that shaped her early life. When she has a baby out of wedlock – conceived with a man her parents consider a bad match – she rejects the tradition that would compel her to give the child over to be killed, and instead leaves her, wrapped in a blanket with a tea cake tucked in its folds, near an orphanage in a neighboring city.

As Li-yan comes into herself, leaving her insular village for an education, a business, and city life, her daughter, Haley, is raised in California by loving adoptive parents. Despite her privileged childhood, Haley wonders about her origins, and across the ocean, Li-yan longs for her lost daughter. Over the course of years, each searches for meaning in the study of Pu’er, the tea that has shaped their family’s destiny for centuries.

The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane is an unforgettable portrait of a little-known region and its people and a celebration of the bonds of family.

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.