Woah. Seven months down. Time does fly fast. How has the year been so far? I hope that it has been kind to everyone. Otherwise, I hope the remaining five months will be filled with nothing but good news, happiness, and blessings. More importantly, I hope that everyone will be healthy, in body, mind, and spirit. But before I can bid my birth month goodbye, I am sharing my book haul for the month. At the start of the year, I resolved to read more and buy less. I guess I can tick this resolution off already as a failure although I must say that I was (nearly) able to hold myself from buying even more books during the month. I will be splitting my July book haul into two parts, with the first part featuring works initially written in English. Without more ado, here are the books I obtained during the month. Happy reading!

Title: Half a Life
Author: V.S. Naipaul
Publisher: Vintage International
Publishing Date: October 2002 (2001)
No. of Pages: 211

Synopsis: Spanning three continents and an entire history of caste, class, exile, and dislocation, Half a Life is a beautifully resonant study of the fraudulent bargains that make up an identity. V.S. Naipaul’s protagonist is Willie Chandran, the son of a Brahmin ascetic and the lower-caste woman he married out of ideological spite. At an early age, Willie senses the hollowness at the core of his father’s self-denial and aspires something more genuine.

His search takes him to the immigrant and literary bohemias of 1950s London; to a facile, unsatisfying career as a writer; and, finally, to a decaying Portuguese colony in East Africa, where he finds a happiness he will then be compelled to betray. Masterfully orchestrated, at once elegiac and devastating in its portraits of colonial grandeur and pretension, Half a Life represents the pinnacle of Naipaul’s career.

Title: Yellowface
Author: Rebecca F. Kuang
Publisher: William Morrow
Publishing Date: 2023
No. of Pages: 319

Synopsis: Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena’s a literary darling. June Hayward is literally nobody. Who wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks.

So when June witnesses Athena’s death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena’s just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I.

So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song – complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn’t this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That’s what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree.

But June can’t get away from Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June’s (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.

With its totally immersive first-person voice, Yellowface grapples with questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation, as well as the terrifying alienation of social media. R.F. Kuang’s novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.

Title: In the Time of the Butterflies
Author: Julia Alvarez
Publisher: PLUME
Publishing Date: August 1995 (1994)
No. of Pages: 321

Synopsis: They were the four Mirabal sisters – symbols of defiant hope in a country shadowed by dictatorship and despair. They sacrificed their safe and comfortable lives in the name of freedom. They were Las Mariposas, “The Butterflies,” and in this extraordinary novel Patria, Minerva, Maria Teresa, and Dedé speak across the decades to tell their own stories – from tales of hair ribbons and secret crushes to gunrunning and prison torture – and describe the everyday horrors of life under the Dominican dictator Trujillo. Now through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez’s imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in a warm, brilliant, and heartbreaking novel that makes a haunting statement about the human cost of political oppression.

Title: The Inheritance of Loss
Author: Kiran Desai
Publisher: Grove Press
Publishing Date: 2006
No. of Pages: 358

Synopsis: In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas lives an embittered judge who wants only to retire in peace, when his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, arrives on his doorstep. The judge’s cook watches over her distractedly, for his thoughts are often on his son, Biju, who is hopscotching from one gritty New York restaurant to another. Kiran Desai’s brilliant novel, published to huge acclaim, is a story of joy and despair. Her characters face numerous choices that majestically illuminate the consequences of colonialism as it collides with the modern world.

Title: The Book of Goose
Author: Yiyun Li
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publishing Date: 2022
No. of Pages: 348

Synopsis: Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnès, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised – the place that Fabienne helped Agnès escape ten years ago. Now Agnès is free to tell her story.

As children in a war-ravaged backwater town, they’d built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves – until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnès on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss.

A magnificent, beguiling tale winding from the postwar rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school to the quiet Pennsylvania home where a woman can live without her past, The Book of Goose is a story of disturbing intimacy and obsession, of exploitation and strength of will, bu the celebration author Yiyun Li.