Hello, readers! Welcome to another #5OnMyTBR update. The rule is relatively simple. I have to pick five books from my to-be-read pile that fit the week’s theme.

This week’s theme: Title Starting with a ‘C’

5OnMyTBR is a bookish meme hosted by E. @ Local Bee Hunter’s Nook where you chose five books from your to-be-read pile that fit that week’s theme. If you’d like more info, head over to the announcement post!

Title: Cloudstreet
Author: Tim Winton
Publisher: Picador Classic
Publishing Date: 2015 (1991)
No. of Pages: 431

Synopsis: 

Will you look at us by the river! The whole restless mob of us on spread blankets in the dreamy briny sunshine skylarking and chiacking about for one day, one clear, clean sweet day in a good world in the midst of our living.

No. 1 Cloudstreet: a broken-down house on the wrong side of the tracks, a place teeming with memories, with shudders and shadows and spirits. From separate catastrophes, two families – the Pickles and Lambs – flee to the city and find themselves thrown together, forced to start their lives afresh. As they roister and rankle, the place that began as a roof over their heads becomes a home for their hearts.

Winner of Australia’s prestigious Miles Franklin Award, Cloudstreet is Tim Winton’s great family drama, a twenty-year story of life and love, full of boisterous energy, joy and heartbreak. His visceral evocation of the Australian landscape is nowhere more extraordinary than in this classic.

Title: Caleb’s Crossing
Author: Geraldine Brooks
Publisher: Viking
Publishing Date: 2011
No. of Pages: 300

Synopsis: 

In her new novel, Caleb’s Crossing, Geraldine Brooks once again takes a shard of little-known history and brings it vividly to life. In 1665, a young man from Martha’s Vineyard became the first Native American graduate of Harvard College. From the few facts that survive of this extraordinary life, Brooks creates a luminous tale of passion and belief, magic and adventure.

The voice of Caleb’s Crossing belongs to Martha Mayfield, growing up in the tiny island settlement of Great Harbor amid a small band of pioneering English Puritans. Possessed of a restless spirit and a curious mind, Bertha slips the sounds of her rigid society to explore the island’s glistening beaches and observe its native inhabitants. At twelve, she meets Caleb, the young son of a chieftain, and the two forge a secret bond that draws each into the alien world of the other.

Bertha’s father is Great Harbor’s minister, who feels called to convert the Wampanoag to his own strict Calvinism. He awakens the wrath of the medicine men, against whose magic he must test his faith in a high-stakes battle that may cost his life and his very soul. Caleb becomes a prize in this contest between old ways and new, eventually taking his place at Harvard, studying Latin and Greek alongside the sons of the colonial elite. Bethia also finds herself in Cambridge at the behest of her imperious elder brother. As she fights for a voice in a society that requires her silence, she also becomes entangled in Caleb’s struggle to navigate the intellectual and cultural shoals that divide their cultures.

What becomes of these two characters – the triumphs and turmoil they endure in embracing their new destinies – is the subject of this riveting and intensely observed novel. Like Brooks’s beloved narrator Anna in Year of Wonders, Bethia proves an emotionally irresistible guide to the wilds of Martha Vineyard and to the intimate spaces of the human heart. The narrative travels from the sparkling harbors of Martha’s Vineyard to the mean, drafty dormitories of early Harvard and, as ever, Brooks buttresses her richly imagined fiction with the fascinating and meticulously researched detail that has brought her legions of readers and a Pulitzer Prize.

Title: Chemmeen
Author: Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai
Translator (from Malayalam): Anita Nair
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Publishing Date: 2011
No. of Pages: 238

Synopsis: 

First published in 1956, Chemmeen was adapted into a film of the same name, and won critical acclaim as well as unprecedented commercial success. A deeply affecting story of love and loss set amidst a fishing community in Kerala, the novel transports us into the lives and minds of its characters, Karuthamma and Pareekutty, whose love remains outside the bounds of religion, caste, and marriage. Then, one night, Karuthamma and Pareekutty meet and their love is rekindled while Palani, Karuthamma’s husband, is at sea, baiting a shark.

Title: Changes
Author: Ama Ata Aidoo
Publisher: The Women’s Press Ltd.
Publishing Date: November 1991
No. of Pages: 166

Synopsis: 

In this lively and touching novel about Esi, freshly separated from her husband and confronted with the near impossibility of finding male love and companionship on anything like acceptable terms, the distinguished Ghanaian writer, Ama Ata Aidoo, shows herself once more on entertaining and unreformed subversive.

Changes is her latest novel, and in it she indulges in a skilful play of irony and social satire brought off with irrepressible joyousness that will delight new readers and old friends alike.

Title: Castle Gripsholm
Author: Kurt Tucholsky
Translator (from German): Michael Hofmann
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Publishing Date: 2019
No. of Pages: 127

Synopsis: 

 Castle Gripsholm, the best and most beloved work by Kurt Tucholsky, is a short novel about an enchanted summer holiday. It begins with an assignment: Tucholsky’s publisher wants him to write something light and funny, otherwise about whatever Tucholsky wants. A deal is struck and the story is off: about Peter, a writer; his girlfriend, known as the Princess; and a summer vacation far from the hurly-burly of Berlin. Peter and the Princess have rented a small house attached to a historic castle in Sweden, and they have five weeks of long days and white nights at their disposal; five weeks for swimming and walking and sex and talking and visits with Peter’s buddy Karlchen and with Billy, the Princess’s best friend. It is perfect, until they meet a weeping girl fleeing the cruel headmistress of a home for children. The vacationers decide they must free the girl and send her back to her mother in Switzerland, which brings about an encounter with authority that casts a worrying shadow over their radiant summer idyll. Soon they must return to Germany. What kind of fairy tale are they living in?