Hello, readers! It is Monday again! As it is Monday, welcome to another #5OnMyTBR update. The rule is relatively simple. I must pick five books from my to-be-read piles that fit the week’s theme.

This week’s theme: Released in the Decade You Were Born

I was born in July 1990 so I will be featuring books released in the 1990s.

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: 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: In the Time of the Butterflies
Author: Julia Alvarez
Publisher: PLUME
Publishing Date: August 1995 (1994)
No. of Pages: 321

Synopsis: 

They were the four Mirabal sisters – symbols of defiant hope in a country shadowed by dictatorship and despair. They sacrificed their safe and comfortable lives in the name of freedom. They were Las Mariposas, “The Butterflies,” and in this extraordinary novel Patria, Minerva, Maria Teresa, and Dedé speak across the decades to tell their own stories – from tales of hair ribbons and secret crushes to gunrunning and prison torture – and describe the everyday horrors of life under the Dominican dictator Trujillo. Now through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez’s imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in a warm, brilliant, and heartbreaking novel that makes a haunting statement about the human cost of political oppression.

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.

Title: Brazil-Maru
Author: Karen Tei Yamashita
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Publishing Date: 1992
No. of Pages: 248

Synopsis: 

Karen Tei Yamashita’s eagerly anticipated second novel tells the little-known story of Brazil’s huge Japanese immigrant population This multi-generational saga relates one group’s attempt to build a utopia while surviving the suspicions of World War II, the conflict between individual freedom and community responsibility, and the dangerous allure of a charismatic leader.

Karen Tei Yamashita went to Brazil in 1975 on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship and spent two years following the path of one particular immigrant story which began in Sao Paulo. She married a Brazilian and stayed in Brazil for nine years before returning with her family to her native California. She won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for her first novel, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, and her plays have been produced at a variety of West Coast locations.

Title: The Tortilla Curtain
Author: T Coraghessan Boyle
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 1996 (1995)
No. of Pages: 355

Synopsis: 

Topanga Canyon is home to two couples on a collision course. Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher lead an ordered sushi-and-recycling existence in a newly gated hilltop community: he a sensitive nature writer, she an obsessive realtor. Mexican illegals Cándido and América Rincón desperately cling to their vision of the American Dream as they fight off starvation in a makeshift camp deep in the ravine. And from the moment a freak accident brings Cándido and Delaney into intimate contact, these four and their opposing worlds gradually intersect in what becomes a tragicomedy of error and misunderstanding.

Title: Bamboo in the Wind
Author: Azucena Grajo Uranza
Publisher: The Bookmark, Inc.
Publishing Date: 2002 (1990)
No. of Pages: 539

Synopsis: 

Larry Esteva, coming home from studies in Boston, witnesses at the airport a riotous demonstration that is forcibly dispersed by the military. The end of his journey turns out to be the beginning of an odyssey in his beloved city where he finds “an insidious lawlessness creeping upon the land.”

Set in Manila in the last beleaguered months before the politico-military take-over in 1972, Bamboo in the Wind tells of the last desperate efforts of a people fighting to stave off disaster. Amid the escalating madness of a regime gone berserk, an odd assortment of people – a senator, a young nationalist, a dispossessed farmer, a radical activist, a convent school girl, a Jesuit scholastic – make their way along the labyrinthine corridors of greed and power. Each is forced to examine his own commitment in the face of brutality and evil, as the book conjures up scene after scene of devastation: the massacre of the demonstrators, the demolition of Sapang Bato, the murder of the sugar plantation workers, the burning of the Laguardia ricefields. And, as a climax to the mounting violence, that final September day – the arrests, the torture, and finally the darkness that overtakes the land.