And just like that, the ninth month of the year is through. Woah. Time does fly fast. We are already in the final stretch of the year. By the way, how has your year been, so far? I hope that it has been going great. Otherwise, I hope the rest of the year will be filled with good news, happiness, and blessings. I hope you will get repaid for everything you worked hard for during the year. More importantly, I hope everyone will be healthy in body, mind, and spirit. But before I can wave September goodbye, I am sharing my book haul for the previous month. Without more ado, here are the books I obtained during the month. Happy reading!

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 a Kindertrasport 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 boarded another train, fleeing looming 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: Crook Manifesto
Author: Colson Whitehead
Publisher: Doubleday
Publishing Date: 2023
No. of Pages: 319

Synopsis: It’s 1971. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is careening toward bankruptcy, and a shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Amid this collective nervous breakdown furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney tries to keep his head down and his business thriving. His days moving stolen goods around the city are over. It’s strictly the straight and narrow for him – until he needs Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter, May, and he decides to hip up his old police contact, Munson, fixer extraordinaire. But Munson has his own favors to ask of Carney and staying out of the game gets a lot more complicated and deadly.

It’s 1973. The counterculture has created a new generation, the old ways are being overthrown, but there is one constant – Pepper, Carney’s endearingly violent partner in crime. It’s getting harder to put together a reliable crew for hijackings, heists, and assorted felonies, so Pepper takes on a side gig doing security on a Blaxpoitation shoot in Harlem. He finds himself in a freaky world of Hollywood stars, up-and-coming comedians, and celebrity drug dealers, in addition to the usual cast of hustlers, mobsters, and hit men. These adversaries underestimate the seasoned crook – to their regret.

1976. Harlem is burning, block by block while the whole country is gearing up for Bicentennial celebrations. Carney is trying to come up with a July Fourth ad he can live with (TWO HUNDRED YEARS OF GETTING AWAY WITH IT!), while his wife, Elizabeth, is campaigning for her childhood friend, former D.A. and rising politician Alexander Oakes. When a fire severely injures one of Carney’s tenants, he enlists Pepper to look into who may be behind it. Our crooked duo have to battle their way through a crumbling metropolis run by the shady, the violent, and the utterly corrupted.

Crooked Manifesto is a darkly funny tale of a city under siege, but also a sneakily searching portrait of the meaning of family. Colson Whitehead’s kaleidoscopic portrait of Harlem is sure to stand as one of the all-time great evocations of a place and a time.

Title: I Have Some Questions For You
Author: Rebecca Makkai
Publisher: Viking
Publishing Date: 2023
No. of Pages: 435

Synopsis: A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past – the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Ketih, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia’s death and the guilt of the school’s athletic trainer, Omar Evans, are hotly debated online, Bodie prefers – needs – to let sleeping dogs lie. But when she’s invited back to teach a course, Bodie falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid. She begins to wonder if the wrong man was convicted, and if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.

I Have Some Questions for You is award-winning author Rebecca Makkai’s most irresistible novel yet: a stirring investigation into collective memory and a deeply felt examination of one woman’s reckoning with her past, with a transfixing mystery at its heart. Timely, hypnotic, and populated with a cast of unforgettable characters, I Have Some Questions for You is at once a compulsive page-turner and a literary triumph.

Title: Our Share of Night
Author: Mariana Enriquez
Translator (from Spanish): Megan McDowell
Publisher: Hogarth
Publishing Date: 2022 (2019)
No. of Pages: 588

Synopsis: A woman’s mysterious death puts her husband and son on a collision course with her demonic family in the first novel to be translated into English by the International Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Dangers of Smoking in Bed – “the most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time” (Kazuo Ishiguro).

A young father and son set out on a road trip, devastated by the death of the wife and mother they both loved. United in grief, the pair travel to her ancestral home, where they must confront the terrifying legacy she has bequeathed: The woman they mourn came from a clan like no other – a centuries-old secret society called the Order that commits unspeakable acts in search of eternal life.

For Gaspar, the son, this maniacal cult is his destiny, and now he is in danger. As the Order tries to possess him. father and son take flight, yet nothing will stop the Order, for nothing is beyond them. But how far will Gaspar’s father go to protect his child? And can anyone escape their fate?

Moving back and forth in time, from London in the swinging 1960s to the brutal years of Argentina’s military dictatorship and its turbulent aftermath, Our Share of Night is a novel like no other: a family story, a ghost story, a story of the occult and the supernatural, a book about the complexities of love and longing with queer subplots and themes. This is the masterwork of one of Latin America’s most original novelists, “a mesmerizing writer,” says Dave Eggers, “who demands to be read.”

Title: Family Lore
Author: Elizabeth Acevedo
Publisher: ECCO
Publishing Date: 2023
No. of Pages: 368

Synopsis: Flor has a gift: she can predict, to the day, when someone will die. So when she decides she wants a living wake – a party to bring her family and community together to celebrate the long life she’s led – her sisters are surprised. Has Flor foreseen her own death, or someone else’s? Does she have other motives? She refuses to tell her sisters, Matilde, Pastor, and Camila.

But Flor isn’t the only person with secrets: her sisters are hiding things, too. And the next generation, cousins Ona and Yadi, face tumult of their own.

Spanning the three days prior to the wake, Family Lore traces the lives of each of the Marte women, weaving together past and present, Santo Domingo and New York City. Told with Elizabeth Acevedo’s inimitable vice, this is an indelible portrait of sisters and cousins, aunts and nieces – one family’s journey through their history, helping them better navigate all that is to come.

Title: Tom Lake
Author: Ann Patchett
Publisher: Harper
Publishing Date: 2023
No. of Pages: 309

Synopsis: In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family’s orchard in northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughter examine their own lives and their relationship with their mother, and are forced to reframe their understanding of the world they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives our parents led before they were our parents. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional acuity, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most acclaimed literary talents at work today.

Title: Bamboo in the Wind
Author: Azucena Grajo Uranza
Publisher: The Bookmark, Inc.
Publishing Date: 2002 (1990)
No. of Pages: 539

Synopsis: Larry Esteva, coming home from studies in Boston, witnesses at the airport a riotous demonstration that is forcibly dispersed by the military. The end of his journey turns out to be the beginning of an odyssey in his beloved city where he finds “an insidious lawlessness creeping upon the land.”

Set in Manila in the last beleaguered months before the politico-military take-over in 1972, Bamboo in the Wind tells of the last desperate efforts of a people fighting to stave off disaster. Amid the escalating madness of a regime gone berserk, an odd assortment of people – a senator, a young nationalist, a dispossessed farmer, a radical activist, a convent school girl, a Jesuit scholastic – make their way along the labyrinthine corridors of greed and power. Each is forced to examine his own commitment in the face of brutality and evil, as the book conjures up scene after scene of devastation: the massacre of the demonstrators, the demolition of Sapang Bato, the murder of the sugar plantation workers, the burning of the Laguardia ricefields. And, as a climax to the mounting violence, that final September day – the arrests, the torture, and finally the darkness that overtakes the land.

Title: Dust Child
Author: Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai
Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Publishing Date: 2023
No. of Pages: 332

Synopsis: In 1969, sisters Trang and Quỳnh, desperate to help their parents pay off debts, leave their rural village to work at a bar in Sài Gòn. Once in the big city, the young girls are thrown headfirst into a world they were not expecting. They learn how to speak English, how to dress seductively, and how to drink and flirt (and more) with American GIs in return for money. As the war moves closer to the city, the once-innocent Trang gets swept up in an irresistible romance with a handsome and kind American helicopter pilot she meets at the bar.

Decades later, an American veteran, Dan returns to Việt Nam with his wife, Linda, in search of a way to heal from his PTSD; instead, secrets he thought he had buried surface and threaten his marriage. At the same time, Phong – the adult son of a Black American soldier and a Vietnamese woman – embarks on a mission to find both his parents and a way out of Việt Nam. Abandoned in front of an orphanage, Phong grew up being called “the dust of life,” “Black American imperialist,: and “child of the enemy,” and he dreams of a better life in the United States for himself, his wife Bình, and his children.

Past and present converge as these characters come together to confront decisions made during a time of war—decisions that reverberate throughout one another’s lives and ultimately allow them to find common ground across race, generation, culture, and language. Immersive, moving, and lyrical, Dust Child tells an unforgettable story of how those who inherited tragedy can redefine their destinies with hard-won wisdom, compassion, courage, and joy.