This is the second part of my July book haul. Part I featured books initially written in English. The second part will feature books that were translated into English. Without more ado, here are the books I obtained during the month. Happy reading!

Title: Whale
Author: Cheon Myeong-Kwan
Translator (from Korean): Chi-Young Kim
Publisher: Europa Editions
Publishing Date: 2023 (2004)
Number of Pages: 367

Synopsis: Whale is a sweeping, multi-generational tale that blends fable, farce and fantasy.

Set in a remote village in South Korea, Cheon Myeong-Kwan’s beautifully crafted novel follows the lives of three linked characters: Geumbok, an extremely ambitious woman who has never recovered from the indescribable thrill she experienced when she first saw a whale crest in the ocean; her mute daughter, Chunhui, who communicates with elephants; and a one-eyed woman who controls honeybees with a whistle.

Written by one of South Korea’s most original voices, Whale is a novel brimming with surprises and wicked humour; a picaresque narrative that casts a satirical eye on Korea’s whirlwind transformation into a highly developed and wealthy nation.

Title: The Gospel According to the New World
Author: Maryse Condé
Translator (From French): Richard Philcox
Publisher: World Editions
Publishing Date: 2023 (2021)
No. of Pages: 251

Synopsis: One Easter Sunday, Madame Ballandra puts her hands together and exclaims: “A Miracle!” Baby Pascal is strikingly beautiful, brown in complexion, with gray-green eyes like the sea. But where does he come from? Is he really the child of God? So goes the rumor, and many signs throughout his life will cause this theory to gain ground. From journey to journey and from one community to another, Pascal sets off in search of his origins, trying to understand the meaning of his mission. Will he be able to change the fate of humanity? And what will the New World Gospel reveal? For all its beauty, vivacity, humor, and power, Maryse Condé’s latest novel is above all a work of combat. Lucid and full of conviction, Condé attests that solidarity and love remain our most extraordinary and lifesaving forces.

Title: Time Shelter
Author: Georgi Gospodinov
Translator (From Bulgarian): Angela Rodel
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Publishing Date: 2022
No. of Pages: 302

Synopsis: In TIme Shelter, an enigmatic flâneur named Gaustine opens a ‘clinic for the past’ that offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time.

But as the rooms become more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic as a ‘time shelter’ hoping to escape from the horrors of our present – a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present.

Title: Nights of Plague
Author: Orhan Pamuk
Translator (From Turkish): Ekin Oklap
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Publishing Date: 2022 (2021)
No. of Pages: 683

Synopsis: It is April 1901 on the imaginary island of Mingheria – the twenty-ninth state of the Ottoman Empire – located in the eastern Mediterranean between Crete and Cyprus. Half the population is Muslim, the other half is Greek Orthodox, and tension is high between the two. When a plague arrives – brought either by Muslim pilgrims returning from Mecca or by merchant vessels coming from Alexandria – the island revolts.

To stop the epidemic, the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamit II sends his most accomplished quarantine expert, an Orthodox Christian, to the island. Some of the Muslims, including followers of a popular religious sect, refuse to take precautions or respect the quarantine. And then a murder occurs.

As the plague continues its rapid spread, the Sultan next sends his niece, Princess Pakize, and her husband, an acclaimed doctor (and a Muslim), to manage the crisis. But the incompetence of the island’s governor and local administration, and the people’s refusal to respect restrictions, doom the quarantine to failure – and the death count continues to rise. Because of the danger that the plague might spread to the West, the people of Mingheria are cut off and let to defeat the plague themselves.

Steeped in history and rife with suspense, Nights of Plague is an epic story of love, politics, and a nightmarish plague that threatens to bring an end to an empire. It is a stunning work from one of our most essential writers.

Title: Dance on the Volcano
Author: Marie Vieux-Chauvet
Translator (From French): Kaiama L. Glover
Publisher: Archipelago Books
Publishing Date: 2016 (1957)
No. of Pages: 492

Synopsis: Set in late 18th-century Haiti, Dance on the Volcano follows the extraordinary career of Minette, a singer whose prodigious voice enables her to cross racial barriers. Her talent brings her an opportunity to perform at the Theater of Port-au-Prince, an honor previously reserved for Whites. Once the curtain falls, however, she finds herself back to life as normal. Torn between her passion for the stage, her horror at the racial discrimination she faces, and her love for a free black man who treats his slaves as cruelly as white landholders, Minette’s tumult mirrors the volatile condition of the colony. Praised but unpaid, applauded but shut out, Minette develops a political and racial conscience that will not let her rest as long as slavery exists on the island and which fuels her relationship with Rigaud, Pétion, and Beauvais, the future heroes of the revolution. Kaiama L. Grover’s masterful translation brings to light this stunning novel of the Haitian revolution.

Title: Z
Author: Vassilis Vassilikos
Translator (From Greek): Marilyn Calmann
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Publishing Date: January 2017 (1966)
No. of Pages: 406

Synopsis: A progressive parliamentary deputy is scheduled to appear at a political rally. Meanwhile, local political bosses plot his assassination. Thugs are recruited to disrupt the rally. Rumors begin to spread. But the forces already set in motion are irresistible. Z is the story of a crime, a time, a place, and people transformed by events.

Z was published in Greece in 1966, and banned there one year later. It is based on an actual political assassination in 1963 in Salonika. The victim was Gregory Lambrakis, a socialist legislator and outspoken critic of the government. But Lamrakis’s killers could not have anticipated the public response. His funeral became a political event; by the time the cortege reaches Athens, 400,000 people were following the coffin in silence. In the nation’s capital, the letter Z suddenly appeared on walls, sidewalks, posters – everywhere. Z stands for the Greek verb zei, “he lives.”

Title: Inheritance from Mother
Author: Minae Mizumura
Translator (From Japanese): Juliet Winters Carpenter
Publisher: Other Press
Publishing Date: 2019 (2012)
No. of Pages: 447

Synopsis: Mitsuki Katsura, a Japanese woman in her mid-fifties, is a French-language instructor at a private university in Tokyo. Her husband, whom she met in Paris, is a professor at another private university. He is having an affair with a much younger woman.

In addition to her husband’s infidelity, Mitsuki must deal with her ailing eighty-something mother, a demanding, self-absorbed woman who is far from the image of the patient, self-sacrificing Japanese matriarch. Mitsuki finds herself guiltily dreaming of the day when her mother will finally pass on. While doing everything she can to ensure her mother’s happiness, she grows weary of the responsibilities of being a doting daughter and worries she is sacrificing her chance to find fulfillment in her middle age.

Inheritance from Mother not only offers insight into a complex and paradoxical culture, but is also a profound work about mothers and daughters, marriage, old age, and the resilience of women.

Title: The Room In-Between
Author: Ana Maria Delgado
Translator (From Spanish): Sylvia Ehrlich Lipp
Publisher: Latin American Literary Review Press
Publishing Date: 1995 (2021)
No. of Pages: 91

Synopsis: Mariana, a woman haunted by memories of an unhappy childhood and fear of abandonment, travels to her dying mother’s beside. In a series of interior monologues, directed toward herself and her mother, she confronts the vents and decisions which have shaped her adult life. Mariana learns to break through her bitterness, eventually understanding and forgiving her mother, husband, and children.

Title: A Time for Everything
Author: Karl Ove Knausgaard
Translator (From Norwegian): James Anderson
Publisher: Archipelago Books
Publishing Date: 2016 (2004)
No. of Pages: 499

Synopsis: In the sixteenth century, Antinous Bellori, a boy of eleven, is lost in a dark forest and stumbles upon two glowing beings, one carrying a spear, the other a flaming torch… This event this decisive in Bellori’s life, and he thereafter devotes himself to the pursuit and study of angels, the intermediaries of the divine. Beginning in the Garden of Eden and soaring through to the present, A Time for Everything reimagines pivotal encounters between humans and anegls: the glow of the cherubim watching over Eden; the profound love between Cain and Abel despite their differences; Lot’s shame in Sodom; Noah’s isolation before the flood; Ezekiel tied to his bed, prophesying ferociously; the death of Christ; and the emergence of sensual, mischievous cherubs in the seventeenth century. Alighting upon these dramatic scenes – from the Bible and beyond – Knausgaard’s imagination takes flight: the result is a dazzling display of storytelling at its majestic spellbinding best. Incorporating and challenging tradition, legend, and the Apocrypha, these penetrating glimpses hazard chilling questions: can the nature of the divine undergo change, and can the immortal perish?

Title: Untold Night and Day
Author: Bae Suah
Translator (From Korean): Deborah Smith
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Publishing Date: 2020 (2013)
No. of Pages: 152

Synopsis: It’s twenty-eight-year-old Ayami’s final day at her box-office job in Seoul’s only audio theater for the blind. The theater is shutting down and Ayami’s future is uncertain.

Her last shift completed, Ayami walks the streets of the city with her former boss late into the night, searching for a mutual friend who is missing. Their conversations take in art, love, food, and the inaccessible country to the north. The next day, Ayami acts as a guide for a detective novelist visiting from abroad. Almost immediately, in the heat of Seoul at the height of the summer, order gives way to chaos as the edges of reality start to fray. Ayami enters a world of increasingly tangled threads, and the past intrudes upon the present as overlapping realities repeat, collide, change, and reassert themselves.

Blisteringly original, Untold Night and Day upends the very structure of fiction and narrative storytelling and burns itself upon the soul of the reader. By one of the boldest and most innovative voices in contemporary Korean literature, and masterfully realized in English by Man Booker International Prize-winning translator Deborah Smith, Bae Suah’s hypnotic novel asks whether more than one version of ourselves can exist at one, demonstrating the malleable nature of reality as we know it.