Happy Halloween everyone! Just like that, the tenth month of the year is over. This means that we have just sixty-one days to wrap things up this year. Time does fly fast. Before we know it, we will be welcoming 2024. As the year slowly draws its curtain toward its inevitable close, I hope that you are all doing well. I hope that it has been going great. Otherwise, I hope the rest of the year will be filled with good news, healing, 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 October goodbye, I am sharing my book haul for the previous month. Curiously, all but one of the books I obtained were originally written in a foreign language. It was without design. Without more ado, here are the books I obtained during the month. Happy reading!

Title: Chilean Poet
Author: Alejandro Zambra
Translator (from Spanish): Megan McDowell
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 2022 (2020)
No. of Pages: 358

Synopsis: After a chance encounter at a Santiago nightclub, aspiring poet Gonzalo reunites with his first love, Carla, now the mother of a six-year-old son, Vicente. Soon the three form a happy sort-of family – a stepfamily, though no such word exists in their language.

Their ambitions ultimately pull the lovers in different directions, but Vicente nevertheless inherits his ex-stepfather’s love of poetry. When, at eighteen, he meets Pru, an American journalist adrift in Santiago, he encourages her to write about Chilean poets. Her research leads her to an eccentric, dysfunctional community – another kind of family. Will it also lead Vicente and Gonzalo back to each other?

Written with enormous insight, humor, and tenderness, and brilliantly translated by four-time International Booker Prize nominee Megan McDowell, Chilean Poet is a moving exploration of family – what it means to create one, to lose one, and to find one unexpectedly.

Title: Can’t I Go Instead
Author: Lee Geum-Yi
Translator (from Korean): An Seonjae
Publisher: Forge
Publishing Date: 2023 (2016)
No. of Pages: 369

Synopsis: Two women’s lives and identities are intertwined – through World War II and the Korean War – revealing the harsh realities of class division in the early part of the twentieth century.

Can’t I Go Instead follows the lives of the daughter of a Korean nobleman and her maidservant in the early twentieth century. When the daughter’s suitor is arrested as a Korean Independence activist, and she is implicated during the investigation, she is quickly forced into marriage to one of her father’s Japanese employees and shipped off to the United States. At the same time, her maidservant is sent in her mistress’s place to be a comfort woman to the Japanese Imperial Army.

Years of hardship, survival, and even happiness follow. In the aftermath of World War II, the women make their way home, where they must reckon with the tangled lives they’ve led, in an attempt to reclaim their identities and find their place in an independent Korea.

Title: The Goodbye Cat
Author: Hiro Arikawa
Translator (from Japanese): Philip Gabriel
Publisher: Berkley
Publishing Date: 2023 (2021)
No. of Pages: 278

Synopsis: Seven cats weave their way through their owners’ lives, climbing, comforting, nestling, and sometimes just tripping everyone up, in this heart-tugging and inspiring collection of tales by Hiro Arikawa, international bestselling author of The Travelling Cat Chronicles.

Against the backdrop of changing seasons in Japan, we meet Spin, a kitten rescued from the recycling bin, whose playful nature and simple needs teach an anxious father how to parent his own human baby; a colony of wild cats on a popular holiday island show a young boy not to stand in nature’s way; a family is perplexed by their cat’s undying devotion to their charismatic but uncaring father; a woman curses how her cat will not stpo visiting her at night; and an elderly cat hatches a plan to pass into the next world as a spirit so that he and his owner may be in each other’s lives forever.

Bursting with love and warmth, The Goodbye Cat exquisitely explores the cycle of life, from birth to death – as each of the seven stories explores how, in different ways, the steadiness and devotion of a well-loved cat never let us down. A huge bestseller in Japan, this magical book is a joyous celebration of the wondrousness of cats and why we choose to share our lives with them.

Title: Woman of the Ashes
Author: Mia Couto
Translator (from Portuguese): David Brookshaw
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publishing Date: 2018 (2019)
No. of Pages: 254

Synopsis: Mozambique, 1894. Sergeant Germano de Melo is posted to the village of Nkokolani to oversee the Portuguese conquest of territory claimed by Ngungunyane, the last emperor of the State of Gaza. Ngungunyane has raised an army to resist colonial rule and with his warriors is slowly approaching the border village. Desperate for help, Germano enlists Imani, a fifteen-year-old girl, to act as his interpreter. She belongs to the VaChopi tribe, one of the few who dared side with the Portuguese Crown, while the others have chosen the African emperor. Standing astride two kingdoms, Imani is drawn to Germano, just as he is drawn to her. But she knows that in a country haunted by violence, the only way out for a woman is to go unnoticed, as if made of shadows or ashes.

Alternating between the voices of Imani and Germano, Mia Couto’s Woman of the Ashes combines vivid folkloric prose with extensive historical research to give a spellbinding and unsettling account of war-torn Mozambique at the end of the nineteenth century.

Title: Family Lore
Author: Yu Miri
Translator (from Korean): Morgan Giles
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Publishing Date: 2023 (2004)
No. of Pages: 710

Synopsis: In 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea, Lee Woo-cheol was a running prodigy and a contender for the upcoming Tokyo Olympics. But he would have to run under the Japanese flag.

Nearly a century later, his granddaughter is living in Japan and training to run a marathon herself. She summons Korean shamans to hold an intense, transcendent ritual to connect with Lee Woo-cheol. When his ghost appears, alongside those of his brother Lee Woo-gun and their young neighbor, who was forced to become a “comfort woman” to Japanese soldiers stationed in China during World War II, she must tell their stories to free their souls. What she discovers is at the heart of this sweeping, majestic novel about a family that endured death, love, betrayal, war, political upheaval, and ghosts, both vengeful and wistful.

A poetic masterpiece that is a sprawling family saga and a feat of historical fiction, full of mind-bending storytelling acrobatics, The End of August is a marathon of literature.

Title: The Wolves of Eternity
Author: Karl Ove Knausgård
Translator (from Norwegian): Martin Aitken
Publisher: Penguin Press
Publishing Date: 2023 (2021)
No. of Pages: 789

Synopsis: In 1986, twenty-year-old Syvert Løyning returns from the military to his mother’s home in southern Norway. One evening, his dead father comes to him in a dream. Realizing that he doesn’t really know who his father was, Syvert begins to investigate his life and finds clues pointing to the Soviet Union. What he learns changes his past and undermines the entire notion of who he is. But when his mother becomes ill, and he must care for his little brother, Joar, on his own, he no longer has time or space for lofty speculations.

In present-day Russia, Alevtina Kotov, a biologist working at Moscow University, is traveling with her young son to the home of her stepfather, to celebrate his eightieth birthday. As a student, Alevtina was bright, curious and ambitious, asking the big questions about life and human consciousness. But as she approaches middle age, most of that drive has gone, and she finds herself in a place she doesn’t want to be, without really understanding how she got there. Her stepfather, a musician, raised her as his own daughter, and she was never interested in learning about her biological father; when she finally starts looking into him, she learns that he died many years ago and left two sons, Joar and Syvert.

Years later, when Syvert and Alevtina meet in Moscow, two very different approaches to life emerge. And as a bright star appears in the sky, it illuminates the wonder of human existence and the mysteries that exist beyond our own worldview. Set against the political and cultural backdrop of both the 1980s and the present day, The Wolves of Eternity is an expansive and affecting book about relations—to one another, to nature, to the dead.

Title: The Three Musketeers
Author: Alexandre Dumas
Translator (from French): William Barrow
Publisher: The Reader’s Digest
Publishing Date: 2013 (1844)
No. of Pages: 568

Synopsis: All For One, One For All!

When daring young swordsman d’Artagnan travels to Paris seeking honor and fortune in the king’s Guard, he quickly befriends the famed three Musketeers—Athos, Porthos, and Aramis.

Loyal servants to the crown, the four friends cross swords with street criminals, face the cardinal’s Guards in duels to the death, and save the honor of the queen by unraveling treasonous schemes in a race against time. It will take epic courage, chivalry, and skill to thwart the plots against them and achieve victory at last.

Alexandre Dumas’s classic swashbuckling tale of adventure, swordplay, and unbreakable friendship is enriched with brand-new, action-packed illustrations by renowned artist Brett Helquist. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: The House of Doors
Author: Tan Twan Eng
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Publishing Date: 2023
No. of Pages: 304

Synopsis: The year is 1921, Lesley Hamlyn and her husband, Robert, a lawyer and war veteran, are living at Cassowary House on the Straits Settlement of Penang. When “Willie” Somerset Maugham, a famed writer and old friend of Robert’s, arrives for an extended visit with his secretary, Gerald, the pair threatens a rift that could alter more lives than one.

Mugham, one of the great novelists of his day, is beleaguered: having long hidden his homosexuality, his unhappy and expensive marriage of convenience becomes unbearable after he loses his savings – and the freedom to travel with Gerald. His career deflating, his health failing, Maugham arrives at Cassowary House in desperate need of a subject for his next book. Lesley, too, is enduring a marriage more duplicitous than it first appears. Maugham suspects an affair, and, learning of Lesley’s past connection to the Chinese revolutionary Dr. Sun Yat Sen, decides to probe deeper. But as their friendship grows and Lesley confides in him about life in the Straits, Maugham discovers a far more surprising tale than he imagined, one that involves not only war and scandal but the trial of an Englishwoman charged with murder. It is, to Maugham, a story worthy of fiction.

A mesmerizingly beautiful novel based on real events, The House of Doors traces the fault lines of race, gender, sexuality, and power under empire, and dives deep into the complicated nature of love and friendship in its shadow.