Happy Tuesday everyone! It is the second day of the week already but I hope everyone is doing well and is safe. But let me greet everyone first, at least those who are celebrating, a Merry Christmas. For those who are not, happy holidays. I hope the holiday season has been peaceful and brimming with blessings.

Tuesdays also mean one thing, 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 is The Ten Most Recent Additions to My Bookshelf (Maybe share your holiday book haul?)

toptentuesday

Title: The Bee Sting
Author: Paul Murray
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
Publishing Date: 2023
No. of Pages: 643

Synopsis:

The Barnes family is in trouble

Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under – but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife, Imelda, is selling off her jewellery on eBay and half-heartedly dodging the attentions of fast-talking cattle farmer Big Mike, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way to her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ, in debt to local sociopath ‘Ears’ Moran, is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.

The present is in meltdown, but the causes lie deep in the past. If you wanted to change this story, how far back would you have to go? To the car crash twelve months before Cass was born? To the infamous bee sting which ruined Imelda’s wedding day? All the way back to Dickie at ten years old, trembling before his father in the garden, learning how to be a real man?

The present is in meltdown, but the causes lie deep in the past. If you wanted to change this story, how far back would you have to go? To the car crash twelve months before Cass was born? To the infamous bee sting which ruined Imelda’s wedding day? All the way back to Dickie at ten years old, trembling before his father in the garden, learning how to be a real man?

Title: Western Lane
Author: Chetna Maroo
Publisher: Picador
Publishing Date: 2023
No. of Pages: 161

Synopsis: 

Eleven-year-old Gopi has been playing squash since she was old enough to hold a racket. When her mother dies, her father enlists her in a quietly brutal training regimen, and the game becomes her world. Slowly, she grows apart from her sisters. Her life is reduced to the sport, guided by its rhythms: the serve, the volley, the drive, the shot and its echo.

But on the court, she is not alone. She is with her pa. She is with Ged, a thirteen-year-old boy with his own formidable talent. She is with the players who have come before her. She is in awe.

An indelible coming-of-age story, Chetna Maroo’s first novel captures the ordinary and annihilates it with beauty. Western Lane is a valentine to innocence, to the closeness of sisterhood, to the strange ways we come to know ourselves and each other.

Title: If I Survive You
Author: Jonathan Escoffery
Publisher: 4th Estate
Publishing Date: 2022
No. of Pages: 256

Synopsis:

1979. Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston, Jamaica. But they soon learn that the welcome in America will be far from warm.

Trelawny, their youngest son, comes of age in a society which regards him with suspicion and confusion, greeting him with the puzzled question: ‘What are you?’

Their eldest son Delano’s longing for a better future for his own children is equalled only by his recklessness in trying to secure it.

As both brothers navigate the obstacles littered in their path – an unreliable father, racism, a financial crisis and Hurricane Andrew – they find themselves pitted against one another. Will their rivalry be the thing that finally tears their family apart?

The thrilling linked stories in Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You pulse with inimitable style, heart and barbed humour while unravelling what it means to carve out an existence between cultures, homes and pay cheques. They announce Escoffery as a chronicler of life at its most gruesome and hopeful.

Title: Let Us Descend
Author: Jesmyn Ward
Publisher: Scribner
Publishing Date: 2023
No. of Pages: 299

Synopsis: 

Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation.

Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader’s guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-ling march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with spirits: of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Ward leads readers through the descent, this, her fourth novel, is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation.

From one of the most singularly brilliant and beloved writers of her generation, this miracle of a book inscribed Black American grief and joy into the very land – the rich but unforgiving forests, swamps, and rivers of the American South. Let Us Descend is Jesmyn Ward’s most magnificent novel yet, a masterwork for the ages.

Title: The Torch in My Ear
Author: Elias Canetti
Translator (from German): Joachim Neugroschel
Publisher: Picador
Publishing Date: 1989 (1980)
No. of Pages: 372

Synopsis:

In The Torch in My Ear Elias Canetti, Nobel Prize winner, towering intellectual figure and polymath, gives us his second volume of autobiography.. Using as a framework his admiration for his first great mentor, the Viennese writer Karl Kraus, and his passion for his first wife, Veza, Canetti seamlessly incorporates a profoundly perceptive portrait of Vienna and Berlin in the 1920s. Here are the voices of Brecht, Isaac Babel, George Grosz, and many others. This is autobiography redefining itself.

Title: Seven Houses in France
Author: Bernardo Atxaga
Translator (from Spanish): Margaret Jull Costa
Publisher: Vintage Books
Publishing Date: 2012 (2009)
No. of Pages: 250

Synopsis: 

1903, and Captain Lalande Biran, overseeing a garrison on the bank of the Congo, has an ambition: to amass a fortune and return to the literary cafes of Paris.

His glamorous wife Christine has a further ambition: to own seven houses in France, a house for every year he has been abroad.

At the Captain’s side are an ex-legionnaire womaniser, and a servile, a treacherous man who dreams of running a brothel. At their hands the jungle is transformed into a wild circus of human ambition and absurdity. But everything changes with the arrival of a new officer and brilliant marksman: the enigmatic Chrysostome Liège.

Title: The Accordionist’s Son
Author: Bernardo Atxaga
Translator (from Spanish): Margaret Jull Costa
Publisher: Vintage Books
Publishing Date: 2008 (2003)
No. of Pages: 389

Synopsis:

The Accordionist’s Son is a remarkably powerful and accomplished novel, exploring the life of David Imaz, a former inhabitant of the Basque village of Obaba, now living in exile and ill-health on a ranch in California.

As a young man, David divides his time between his uncle’s ranch and his life in the village, where he reluctantly practises the accordion on the insistence of his authoritarian father. Increasingly aware of the long shadow cast by the Spanish Civil War, he begins to unravel the story of the conflict,t his father’s association with the fascists and his uncle’s opposition and brave decision to hide a wanted republican. Caught between the two men, the course of his own life is changed forever when he agrees to shelter a group of students on the run from the military police.

Title: The Yellow Rain
Author: Julio Llamazares
Translator (from Spanish): Margaret Jull Costa
Publisher: Vintage Books
Publishing Date: 2004 (1988)
No. of Pages: 130

Synopsis: 

Ainelle is a village high in the Spanish Pyrenees. Its houses now stand deserted – and have done so for many years – most of them in ruins. Its last surviving inhabitant, an old man at death’s door, lingers on, and as the first snows of the year fall and the ‘yellow rain’ of autumn leaves flutters about him, he recalls the life he lived and the ghosts – once his friends and neighbors – who now frequent his wavering memory and who have taken possession of his solitude.

Title: Variable Cloud
Author: Carmen Martin Gaite
Translator (from Spanish): Margaret Jull Costa
Publisher: The Harvill Press
Publishing Date: 1995 (1992)
No. of Pages: 374

Synopsis: 

Sofia is mother of three grown-up children and trapped in a loveless marriage to their estranged father Eduardo, a self-preoccupied businessman. Mariana is a psychiatrist with a successful Madrid practice, a shrewd woman of brittle emotions, incapable of forming stable relationships with men. These two women on the threshold of middle age were close friends at school but grew apart, one of them inheriting the other’s lover. Meeting accidentally at a party, they realise that they retain a deep-felt need to confide in each other. While Mariana escapes Madrid for a coastal resort to seek respite in solitude from a damaged love-affair, Sofia walks out on her husband and finds refuge in her children’s chaotic apartment. The two women fill notebooks with their insights and recollections and engage in a correspondence in which they lay bare their souls. They pool these deeply dredged findings about themselves and discover, as they realise on meeting again, that they have written a novel… Variable Cloud a probing, limpid, cruelly witty dissection of married (and unmarried) life in all its absurdities and self-deceptions Here is a brilliant – and chilling – exercise in self-awareness.