Happy Tuesday everyone! As it is Tuesday, it is time for a Top Ten Tuesday update. Top Ten Tuesday is an original blog meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and is currently being hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl.

This week’s given topic: Books on My Fall 2023 To-Read List

toptentuesday

Title: Amalia
Author: José Mármol
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publishing Date: 2001
No. of Pages: 643

Synopsis: 

Written by José Mármol while in exile, Amalia was conceived to protest the cut-throat dictatorship of Juan Migheul de Rosas during the tumultuous years of post-independence Argentina and to provide a picture of the political events during his regime. A year after its publication in 1851, Rosa fell from power, and Amalia became Argentina’s national novel. Though its classic and obligatory status as required reading in Argentina’s schools has clouded its sparkle, it is above all a brilliant and passionate book whose popularity stemmed from the love story that fuels its plot.

Mármol recounts the story of Eduardo and Amalia, who fall in love while Eduardo convalesces from a death-squad attack in Amalia’s home. At once a detailed picture of life under a dictatorship and a tragic love story between a provincial girl and a young man from Buenos Aires, Amalia displays Mármol’s patience with historical detail and his flair for dialogue and description and remains an enduring work of literature in Latin American and the world.

Title: Lost Children Archive
Author: Valeria Luiselli
Publisher: Vintage Books
Publishing Date: 2019
No. of Pages: 350

Synopsis: 

In Valeria Luiselli’s fiercely imaginative novel, a mother and father set out with their two children, a boy and girl, driving form New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. As the family travels west, through Virginia, to Tennessee, across Oklahoma and Texas, their bonds begin to fray: a fissure is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet.

Through sons and maps and Polaroid camera’s lens, the children try to make sense of both their family’s crisis and the larger one engulfing the news: the stories of thousands of kids trying tor cross the southwestern border into the United States but being detained – or getting lost in the desert along the way.

A breathtaking feat of literary virtuosity, Lost Children Archive is timely, compassionate, subtly hilarious, and formally inventive – a powerful, urgent story about what it is to be human in an inhuman world.

Title: The Dream of the Celt
Author: Mario Vargas Llosa
Translator: Edith Grossman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publishing Date: 2012
No. of Pages: 358

Synopsis: 

In 1916, the Irish Nationalist Roger Casement was hanged by the British government for treason. Casement had dedicated his extraordinary life to improving the plight of oppressed peoples around the world – especially the native populations in the Belgian Congo and the Amazon – but when he dared to draw a parallel between the injustices he witnessed in African and American colonies and those committed by the British in Northern Ireland, he became involved in a cause that led to his imprisonment and execution. Ultimately, the scandals surrounding Casement’s trial and eventual hanging tainted his image to such a degree that his pioneering human rights work wasn’t fully reexamined until the 1960s.

In 1916, the Irish Nationalist Roger Casement was hanged by the British government for treason. Casement had dedicated his extraordinary life to improving the plight of oppressed peoples around the world – especially the native populations in the Belgian Congo and the Amazon – but when he dared to draw a parallel between the injustices he witnessed in African and American colonies and those committed by the British in Northern Ireland, he became involved in a cause that led to his imprisonment and execution. Ultimately, the scandals surrounding Casement’s trial and eventual hanging tainted his image to such a degree that his pioneering human rights work wasn’t fully reexamined until the 1960s.

Title: The Sky Over Lima
Author: Juan Gomez Barcena
Translator: Andrea Rosenberg
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publishing Date: 2016
No. of Pages: 275

Synopsis: 

Jose Galvez and Carlos Rodriguez are poets. Or, at least, they’d like to be. Sons of Lima’s elite in the early twentieth century, they scribble bad verses and read the greats: Rilke, Rimbaud, and, above all others, Juan Ramon Jimenez, the Spanish maestro. Desperate for Jimenez’s latest work, which is unavailable for purchase in Peru they decide to ask him for a copy directly.

They’re certain Jimenez won’t send two dilettantes his book – but maybe he’ll favor a beautiful woman. They write to him as the lovely, imaginary Georgina Hubner, and their trick works; Jimenez responds with a letter and an autographed book. Elated, Jose and Carlos write back. Their correspondence continues, and the boys abandon poetry for the pages of Jimenez’s life. But as the months go by, and each barge docked in the  Lima harbor brings with it a new emblem of the Maestro’s growing affection, Jose and Carlos are forced wo reckon with their romance’s inevitable denouement.

Title: The Woman from Uruguay
Author: Pedro Mairal
Translator (from Spanish): Jennifer Croft
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Publishing Date: 2021
No. of Pages: 152

Synopsis: 

From acclaimed Argentine author Pedro Mairal and Man Booker International-winning translator Jennifer Croft, the unforgettable story of two would-be lovers over the course of a single day.

Lucas Pereyra, an unemployed writer in his forties, embarks on a day trip from Buenos Aires to Montevideo to pick up fifteen thousand dollars in cash. An advance due to him on his upcoming novel, the small fortune might mean the solution to his problems, most importantly the tension he has with his wife. While she spends her days at work and her nights out on the town – with a lover, perhaps, he doesn’t know for sure-Lucas is stuck at home all day staring at the blank page, caring for his son Maiko and fantasizing about the one thing that keeps him going: the woman from Uruguay whom he met at a conference and has been longing to see ever since.

But that woman, Magalí Guerra Zabala, is a free spirit with her own relationship troubles, and the day they spend together in this beautiful city on the beach winds up being nothing like Lucas predicted.

The constantly surprising, moving story of this dramatically transformative day in their lives, The Woman from Uruguay is both a gripping narrative and a tender, thought-provoking exploration of the nature of relationships. An international bestseller published in fourteen countries, it is the masterpiece of one of the most original voices in Latin American literature today.

Title: The Wind Knows My Name
Author: Isabel Allende
Translator (from Spanish): Frances Riddle
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Publishing Date: 2023
No. of Pages: 252

Synopsis: 

Vienna, 1938. Samuel Adler is five years old when his father disappears during Kristallnacht – the night his family loses everything. As her child’s safety becomes ever harder to guarantee, Samuel’s mother secures a spot for him on Kindertransport train out of Nazi-occupied Austria to England. He boards alone, carrying nothing but a change of clothes and his violin.

Arizona, 2019. Eight decades later, Anita Diaz and her mother have border another train, fleeing looking danger in El Salvador and seeking refuge in the United States. But their arrival coincides with the new family separation policy, and seven-year-old Anita finds herself alone at a camp in Nogales. She escapes her tenuous reality through her trips to Azabahar, a magical world of the imagination. Meanwhile, Selena Duran, a young social worker, enlists the help of a successful lawyer in hopes of tracking down Anita’s mother.

Intertwining past and present, The Wind Knows My Name tells the tale of these two unforgettable characters, both in search of family and home. It is a testament to the sacrifices that parents make and a love letter to the children who survive the most unfathomable dangers – and never stop dreaming.

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: 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: Tent of Miracles
Author: Jorge Amado
Translator: Barbara Shelby
Publisher: Collins Harvill
Publishing Date: 1989
No. of Pages: 374

Synopsis: 

Tent of Miracles introduces us to perhaps Amado’s richest creation – the late, lovably roguish Pedro Archanjo: street-corner Socrates, devoted anthropologist, cult priest, dean of the demi-monde, bon viveur and indefatigable apostle of miscagenation. Yet Archanjo’s “discovery” by one James D. Levenson – gringo, lover, Nobel Laureate – plunges Bahia into fantastic intrigue. Is Archanjo a savant, a seducer of women exquisite beyond the praise of poets, a rum-sodden scoundrel or a redeemer of magical powers?

Title: The General in His Labyrinth
Author: Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Translator (from Spanish): Edith Grossman
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 1991
No. of Pages: 268

Synopsis: 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s most political novel is the tragic story of General Simon Bolivar, the man who tried to unite a continent.” Bolivar, known in six Latin American countries as the Liberator, is one of the most revered heroes of the western hemisphere; in Garcia Marquez’s reimagining he is magnificently flawed as well. The novel follows Bolivar as he takes his final journey in 1830 down the Magdalena River toward the sea, revisiting the scenes of his former glory and lamenting his lost dream of an alliance of American nations. Forced from power, dogged by assassins, and prematurely aged and wasted by a fatal illness, the General is still a remarkably vital and mercurial man. He seems to remain alive by the sheer force of will that led him to so many victories in the battlefields and love affairs of his past. As he wanders in the labyrinth of his failing powers – and still-powerful memories – he defies his impending death until the last. (Source: Goodreads)