Hello, readers! First of all, let me wish everyone a happy new year. I hope that this year will shower you with blessings. 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: 2024 Releases

I have already shared my 2024 Top 10 Books I Look Forward To List. For this 5 on my TBR update, I will still be sharing 2024 releases. However, I will be qualifying it: I will be sharing translated novels to be released this year.

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: You Dreaed of Empires
Author: Álvaro Enrigue
Translator (from Spanish): Natasha Wimmer
Release Date: January 9

Synopsis: 

From a visionary Mexican author, a hallucinatory, revelatory, colonial revenge story that reimagines the fall of Tenochtitlan.

One morning in 1519, conquistador Hernán Cortés entered the city of Tenochtitlan – today’s Mexico City. Later that day, he would meet the emperor Moctezuma in a collision of two worlds, two empires, two languages, two possible futures.

Cortés was accompanied by his nine captains, his troops, and his two translators: Friar Aguilar, a taciturn, former slave, and Malinalli, a strategic, former princess. Greeted at a ceremonial welcome meal by the steely princess Atotoxli, sister and wife of Moctezuma, the Spanish nearly bungle their entrance to the city. As they await their meeting with Moctezuma – who is at a political, spiritual, and physical crossroads, and relies on hallucinogens to get himself through the day and in quest for any kind of answer from the gods – the Spanish are ensconced in the labyrinthine palace. Soon, one of Cortés’s captains, Jazmín Caldera, overwhelmed by the grandeur of the city, begins to question the ease with which they were welcomed into the city, and wonders at the risks of getting out alive, much less conquering the empire.

You Dreamed of Empires brings to life Tenochtitlan at its height, and reimagines its destiny. The incomparably original Alvaro Enrigue sets afire the moment of conquest and turns it into a moment of revolution, a restitutive, fantastical counter-attack, in a novel so electric and so unique that it feels like a dream. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: Ædnan: An Epic
Author: Linnea Axelsson
Translator (from Swedish): Saskia Vogel
Release Date: January 9

Synopsis: 

The winner of Sweden’s most prestigious literary award makes her American debut with an epic, multigenerational novel-in-verse about two Sámi families and their quest to stay together across a century of migration, violence, and colonial trauma.

In Northern Sámi, the word Ædnan means the land, the earth, and my mother. These are all crucial forces within the lives of the Indigenous families that animate this groundbreaking an astonishing verse novel that chronicles a hundred years of a book that will one day stand alongside Halldór Laxness’s Independent People and Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter as an essential Scandinavian epic.

The tale begins in the 1910s, as Ristin and her family migrate their herd of reindeer to summer grounds. Along the way, forced to separate due to the newly formed border between Sweden and Norway, Ristin loses one of her sons to a deadly accident, a loss that will ripple across the rest of this book. In the wake of this tragedy, Ristin struggles to manage what’s left of her family and her community.

In the 1970s, Lise, as part of a new generation of Sámi grappling with questions of identity and inheritance, reflects on her traumatic childhood, when she was forced to leave her parents and was placed in a Nomad School to be stripped of the language of her ancestors. Finally, in the 2010s we meet Lise’s daughter, Sandra, an embodiment of Indigenous resilience, an activist fighting for reparations in a highly publicized land rights trial, in a time when the Sámi language is all but lost.

Weaving together the voices of half a dozen characters, from elders to young people unsure of their heritage, Axelsson has created a moving family saga around the consequences of colonial settlement. Ædnan is a powerful reminder of how durable language can be, even when it is borrowed, especially when it has to hold what no longer remains. “I was the weight / in the stone you brought / back from the coast // to place on / my grave,” one character says to another from beyond the grave. “And I flew above / the boat calling / to you // There will be rain / there will be rain.” (Source: Goodreads)

Title: Possessed: The Secret of Myslotch
Author: Witold Gombrowicz
Translator (from Polish): J.A. Underwood
Release Date: March 19

Synopsis: 

“Smuggling the most up-to-the-minute contraband in antiquated charabancs-that’s what I like doing,” Gombrowicz said of his work and in this later day Gothic novel he uses all the traditional paraphernalia of haunted castles, mad prince, and riddle from the past to tell the very modern story of two young people caught up in a drama of shifting identities. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: Traces of Enayat
Author: Iman Mersal
Translator (from Arabic): Robin Moger
Release Date: April 2

Synopsis: 

From one of the preeminent poets of the Arab-speaking world, a brilliant work of creative nonfiction retracing the mysterious life and erasure of Egyptian literature’s tragic heroine.

Cairo, 1963: four years before her lone novel is finally published, the writer Enayat al-Zayyat takes her own life at age 27. For the next three decades, it’s as if Enayat never existed at all.

Years later, when celebrated Egyptian poet Iman Mersal stumbles upon Enayat’s long-forgotten Love and Silence in a Cairo book stall, she embarks on a journey of reflection and rediscovery that leads her ever closer to the world and work of Enayat al-Zayyat.

In this luminous biographical detective story, Mersal retraces Enayat’s life and afterlife though interviews with family members and friend, even tracking down the apartments, schools, and sanatoriums where Enayat spent her days. As Mersal maps two simultaneous psychogeographies–from the glamor of golden-age Egyptian cinema to the Cairo of Mersal’s own past–a remarkable portrait emerges of two women striving to live on their own terms.

With Traces of Enayat, Iman Mersal embraces the reciprocal relationship between a text and its reader, between past and present, between author and subject. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: Pink Slime
Author: Fernanda Trías 
Translator (from Spanish): Heather Cleary
Release Date: July 2

Synopsis: 

A taut, harrowing novel about a woman and the people who depend on her as the world around them teeters on the edge of apocalypse—marking an award-winning Latin American author’s US debut.

In a city ravaged by a mysterious plague, a woman tries to understand why her world is falling apart. An algae bloom has poisoned the previously pristine air that blows in from the sea. Inland, a secretive corporation churns out the only food anyone can afford—a revolting pink paste, made of an unknown substance. In the short, desperate breaks between deadly windstorms, our narrator stubbornly tends to her few remaining with her difficult but vulnerable mother; with the ex-husband for whom she still harbors feelings; with the boy she nannies, whose parents sent him away even as terrible threats loomed. Yet as conditions outside deteriorate further, her commitment to remaining in place only grows—even if staying means being left behind.

An evocative elegy for a safe, clean world, Pink Slime is buoyed by humor and its narrator’s resiliency. This unforgettable novel explores the place where love, responsibility, and self-preservation converge, and the beauty and fragility of our most intimate relationships. (Source: Goodreads)