Woah! We are one month into 2024! How time flies even though January feels like it was stretched too long. Whew. We survived one month which has truly been very busy for me because of the statutory report I had to prepare. It is also a busy month for accountants and auditors because of year-end requirements. I hope you are all doing well. I hope everyone is doing well. Before I bid January goodbye, I am sharing my book haul for the first month of the year. Happy reading!

Title: Prophet Song
Author: Paul Lynch
Publisher: Oneworld Publication
Publishing Date: 2023
No. of Pages: 309

Synopsis:

On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her stop. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.

Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappeared, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling.

How far will she go to save her family? And what – or who – is she willing to leave behind?

Title: The Deluge
Author: Stephen Markley
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publishing Date: 2023
No. of Pages: 880

Synopsis: 

In the first of decades of the twenty-first century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological crisis looms. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to a stunning cast of characters – a broken drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, an actor turned religious zealot, and a brazen young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of the decades to come. From the Gulf Coast to Los Angeles, the Midwest to Washington, DC, their intertwined odysseys unfold against a stark backdrop of accelerating chaos, and as their stories hurtle toward a spectacular climax, each faces a reckoning: What will they sacrifice to salvage humanity’s last chance at a future?

Title: The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
Author: Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publishing Date: 2021
No. of Pages: 797

Synopsis:

The great scholar W.E.B. Du Bois once wrote about the problem of race in America and what he called “double-consciousness,” a sensitivity that eery African American possesses to survive.

Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois’s world all too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americans – the revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great-grandmother Pearl, the descendant of enslaved Africans and tenant farmers – Ailey carries Du Bois’s problem on her shoulders. Ailey is reared in the North but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother’s family has fought a battle for belonging that is made even more difficult by a hovering trauma and the whispers of women – her mother, Belle; her sister, Lydia; and a maternal line reaching back two centuries – who urge Ailey to succeed in their stead.

To come to terms with her own identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her family’s past, uncovering the shocking tales of generations of ancestors – Indigenous, Black, and white – in the Deep South. Along the way, Ailey must learn to embrace her full heritage, a legacy of oppression and resistance, bondage and independence, cruelty and resilience, that is the story – and the song – of America itself.

Title: Every Drop is a Man’s Nightmare
Author: Megan Kamalei Kakimoto
Publisher: Granta
Publishing Date: 2023
No. of Pages: 258

Synopsis: 

This sensational debut story collection follows a cast of mixed native Hawaiian and Japanese women through a contemporary landscape thick with inherited wisdom and the hosts of colonisation.

A childhood encounter with a wild pua’a (pig) on the haunted Pali highway portends one young woman’s fraught relationship with her pregnant body. An elderly widow begins seeing her deceased lover in a giant flower. A kanaka writer, mid-manuscript, feels the raw pages quaking and knocking in the briefcase.

Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare is both a fierce love letter to Hawaiian identity and mythology, and a searing dispatch from an occupied territory threatening to erupt with violent secrets.

Title: The Rainbow
Author: Yasunari Kawabata
Translator (from Japanese): Haydn Trowell
Publisher: Vintage International
Publishing Date: 2023 (1950)
No. of Pages: 215

Synopsis:

With the Second World War only a few years in the past, and Japan still reeling from its effects, two sisters – born to the same father but different mothers – struggle to make sense of the new world in which they are coming of age. Asako, the younger, has become obsessed with locating a third sibling, while also experiencing love for the first time. Momoko, their father’s first child – haunted by the loss of her kamikaze boyfriend and their final, disturbing days together – seeks comfort in a series of unhealthy romances. And both sisters find themselves unable to outrun the legacies of their late mothers.

A thoughtful, probing nove about enduring traumas of war, the unbreakable bonds of family, and the inescapability of the past, The Rainbow is a powerful =, poignant, work from Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Title: The Appointment
Author: Herta Müller
Translators (from German): Michael Hulse and Philip Boehm
Publisher: Picador
Publishing Date: 2009 (1997)
No. of Pages: 230

Synopsis: 

“I’ve been summoned. Thursday, ten sharp.” Thus begins a day in the life of a young factory worker during Ceaușescu’s totalitarian regime. She is riding a tram on her way to answer a summons from the secret police. She has been questioned before; this time, she believes, will be worse. She has brought along a towel and her toothbrush in case she’s not allowed to return home. Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men’s suits bound for Italy. “Marry me,” the notes say, with her name and address. Anything to get out of Romania.

As each tram stop brings the young woman closer to the appointment, her thoughts stray to her father and his infidelities; to her friend Lilli, shot trying to flee the country; to her grandparents, deported after her own husband informed on them; and to Paul, her lover, her one source of trust despite his constant drunkenness. In her distraction, she misses her stop and finds herself on an unfamiliar street. And what she discovers there makes her fear of the interrogation pale by comparison.

Bone-spare and intense, The Appointment powerfully renders the humiliating terrors of a crushing regime and its corrosive effects on family and friendship, sex and love.

Title: Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Author: Gabriel García Márquez
Translator (from Spanish): Gregory Rabassa
Publisher: Vintage International
Publishing Date: 1983 (1981)
No. of Pages: 120

Synopsis:

A man returns to the town where a baffling murder took place 27 years earlier, determined to get to the bottom of the story. Just hours after marrying the beautiful Angela Vicario, everyone agrees, Bayardo San Roman returned his bride in disgrace to her parents. Her distraught family forced her to name her first lover; and her twin brothers announced their intention to murder Santiago Nasar for dishonoring their sister.

Yet if everyone knew the murder was going to happen, why did no one intervene to stop it? The more that is learned, the less is understood, and as the story races to its inexplicable conclusion, an entire society – not just a pair of murderers – is put on trial.

Title: Love and Garbage
Author: Ivan Klíma
Translator (from Czech): Ewald Osers
Publisher: Vintage Books
Publishing Date: April 1993 (190)
No. of Pages: 224

Synopsis: 

Like Milan Kundera and Josef Skvorecky, Ivan Klima is a Czech writer whose work was banned in his own country and thus was more or less compelled to become truly international in scope and impact. For although Love and Garbage is set in Prague in the years before the Velvet Revolution, it explores themes of conscience and betrayal that cut to the bone of life in both totalitarian and democratic societies.

The writer-hero of this shrewd, humane, and poignant novel by the author of Judge on Trial has responded to state suppression by becoming a street-sweeper. From his vantage point in Prague’s gutters comes a piercing vision of a world in which everything – from uncomfortable ideas to a former mistress – may be reduced to garbage and only love has the power to grand permanence.