Top Ten Tuesday | Spring Reading List

Happy Tuesday everyone! As it is Tuesday, it is time for 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: Books on my Spring 2024 TBR

Title: The Great Divide
Author: Cristina Henríquez
Publisher: Ecco
Publishing Date: 2024
No. of Pages: 320

Synopsis: 

It is said that the canal will be the greatest feat of engineering in history. But first it must be built. For Franciso, a local fisherman who resents the foreign powers clamoring for a slice of his country, nothing is more upsetting than the decision of his son, Omar, to work as a digger in the excavation zone. But for Omar, whose upbringing was quiet and lonely, this job offers a chance to finally find connection.

Ada Bunting is a bold sixteen-year-old from Barbados who arrives in Panama as a stowaway alongside thousands of other West Indians seeking work. Alone and with no resources, she is determined to find a job that will earn her enough money for her ailing sister’s surgery. When she sees a young man – Omar – who has collapsed after a grueling shift, she is the only one who rushes to his aid.

John Oswald has dedicated his life to scientific research and has journeyed to Panama in single-minded pursuit of one goal: eliminating malaria. But now his wife, Marian, has fallen ill herself, and when he witnesses Ada’s bravery and compassion, he hires her on the spot as a caregiver. This fateful decision sets in motion a tale of ambition, loyalty, and sacrifice.

Searing and empathetic, The Great Divide explores the intersecting lives of activists, fishmongers, laborers, journalists, neighbors, doctors, and soothsayers – those rarely acknowledged by history even as they carved out its course.

Title: Maame
Author: Jessica George
Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin
Publishing Date: 2023
No. of Pages: 307

Synopsis: 

It’s fair to say that Maddie’s life in London is far from rewarding. With a mother who spends most of her time in Ghana (yet still manages to be overbearing), Maddie is the primary caretaker for her father, who suffers from advanced-stage Parkinson’s. At work, her loss is a nightmare, and Maddie is tired of always being the only Black person in every meeting.

So when her mum returns from her latest trip, Maddie seizes the chance to move out of the family home. A self-acknowledged late bloomer, she’s ready to experience som important “firsts”: She finds a flat share, says yes to after-work drinks, pushes for more recognition in her career, and throws herself into the bewildering world of internet dating. But when tragedy strikes, Maddie is forced to face the true nature of her unconventional family, and the perils – and rewards – of putting her heart on the line.

Smart, funny, and affecting, Maame deals with the themes of our time with humor and poignancy: from familial duty and racism to the complexity of love and the lifelong power of friendship. Most important, it explores what it feels like to be torn between two homes and cultures – and it celebrates finally being able to find where you belong.

Title: Of Love and Shadows
Author: Isabel Allende
Translator (from Spanish): Margaret Sayers Peden
Publisher: Black Swan Books
Publishing Date: 1988 (1984)
No. of Pages: 298

Synopsis: 

Set in a country of arbitrary arrests, sudden disappearances and summary executions, Isabel Allende’s magical novel tells of the passionate affair of two people prepared to risk everything for the sake of justice and truth: Irene  Beltrán, a reporter, comes from a wealthy background; Francisco Leal, a young photographer secretly engaged in undermining the military dictatorship, is strongly attracted by her beauty. It does not matter that her fiancé is an army captain: each time Francisco accompanies her on a magazine assignment, he falls more deeply in love with her.

When they go to investigate the mysterious case of Evangelina Ranquileo, a girl suffering from spectacular fits which are rumoured to have miraculous powers, the arrival of soldiers adds a sinister aspect to the mystery. And then Evangelina disappears. Irene and Francisco, in trying to trace her and indict the Junta, become engulfed in a vortex of terror and violence.

Title: The Temple of My Familiar
Author: Alice Walker
Publisher: The Women’s Press
Publishing Date: 1989
No. of Pages: 403

Synopsis: 

A romance of the last 500,000 years,’ so Alice Walker describes The Temple of My Familiar, her first novel since the hugely popular The Color Purple, filmed in 1986 by Steven Spielberg.

Transcending the conventions of time and place, this powerful and visionary novel looks at history from the viewpoint of peoples at present dispossessed and discounted, peoples whose history is ancient and whose future is yet to come.

Leading the story, we find the wonderful, a woman of thousand pasts, and her gentle painter companion Hal; Arveyda the great guitarist and his Latin American wife in flight from her own past; Suwelo the history teacher, whose generation of men has ‘failed women’, and his former wife Fanny who falls in love with spirits… And elsewhere, hovering tantalisingly are Miss Celie and Miss Shug of The Color Purple, to which this story is related both in vision and in spirit.

Title: I’ll Be Right There
Author: Kyung-Sook Shin
Translator (from Korean): Sora Kim-Russell
Publisher: Other Press
Publishing Date: 2013
No. of Pages: 321

Synopsis: 

Set in 1980s South Korea amid the tremors of political revolution, I’ll Be Right There follows Jung Yoon, a highly literate, twenty-something woman, as she recounts her tragic personal history as well as those of her three intimate college friends. When after eight years of separation Yoon receives a distressing phone call from her ex-boyfriend, memories of a tumultuous youth begin to resurface, forcing her to relive the most intense period of her life. With profound intellectual and emotional insight, she revisits the death of her beloved mother, the strong bond with her now-dying former college professor, the excitement of her first love, and the friendships forged out of a shared sense of isolation and grief.

Yoon’s formative experiences, which highlight both the fragility and force of personal connection in an era of absolute uncertainty, become immediately palpable. Shin makes the foreign and esoteric utterly familiar: her use of European literature as an interpreter of emotion and experience bridges any gaps between East and West. Love, friendship, and solitude are the same everywhere, as this book makes poignantly clear.

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: Buddenbrooks
Author: Thomas Mann
Translator (from German): H.T. Lowe-Porter
Publisher: Vintage Books
Publishing Date: May 1984 (1901)
No. of Pages: 604

Synopsis: 

Originally published in Germany in 1901, Buddenbrooks is Thomas Mann’s first major novel, and one of the two for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929.

Buddenbrooks tells the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany. With consummate skill, Mann draws a rounded picture of middle-class life: births and christenings; marriages, divorces, and deaths; successes and failures. These commonplace occurrences, intric=nsically the same, vary slightly as they recur in each succeeding generation. And as the Buddenbrook family eventually succumbs to modern influences – influences which are at variance with their own traditions – its downfall becomes certain.

Title: Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming
Author: László Krasznahorkai
Translator (from Hungarian): Ottilie Mulzet
Publisher: Tuskar Rock Press
Publishing Date: 2021
No. of Pages: 558

Synopsis: 

Nearing the end of his life, Baron Bela Wenckheim flees his gambling debts in Buenos Aires and decides to return to the small Hungarian town where he wishes to be reunited with his high-school sweetheart. News of his arrival travel fast, and the town’s conmen and politicians sense a rare opportunity.

Title: The Wolves of Eternity
Author: Karl Ove Knausgård
Translator (from Norwegian): Martin Aitken
Publisher: Penguin Press
Publishing Date: 2023 (2021)
No. of Pages: 789

Synopsis: 

In 1986, twenty-year-old Syvert Løyning returns from the military to his mother’s home in southern Norway. One evening, his dead father comes to him in a dream. Realizing that he doesn’t really know who his father was, Syvert begins to investigate his life and finds clues pointing to the Soviet Union. What he learns changes his past and undermines the entire notion of who he is. But when his mother becomes ill, and he must care for his little brother, Joar, on his own, he no longer has time or space for lofty speculations.

In present-day Russia, Alevtina Kotov, a biologist working at Moscow University, is traveling with her young son to the home of her stepfather, to celebrate his eightieth birthday. As a student, Alevtina was bright, curious and ambitious, asking the big questions about life and human consciousness. But as she approaches middle age, most of that drive has gone, and she finds herself in a place she doesn’t want to be, without really understanding how she got there. Her stepfather, a musician, raised her as his own daughter, and she was never interested in learning about her biological father; when she finally starts looking into him, she learns that he died many years ago and left two sons, Joar and Syvert.

Years later, when Syvert and Alevtina meet in Moscow, two very different approaches to life emerge. And as a bright star appears in the sky, it illuminates the wonder of human existence and the mysteries that exist beyond our own worldview. Set against the political and cultural backdrop of both the 1980s and the present day, The Wolves of Eternity is an expansive and affecting book about relations—to one another, to nature, to the dead.

Title: A Book of Memories
Author: Péter Nádas
Translators (from Hungarian): Ivan Sanders, Imre Goldstein
Publisher: Picador
Publishing Date: 1997 (1986)
No. of Pages: 706

Synopsis: 

First published in Hungary in 1986, Péter Nádas’s A Book of Memories is a modern classic, a multilayered narrative that tells three parallel stories of love and betrayal. The first takes place in East Berlin in the 1970s and features an unnamed Hungarian writer ensnared in a love triangle with a young German and a famous aging actress. The second composed by the writer, is the story of a late-nineteenth-century German aesthete whose experiences mirror his own. And the third voice is that of a friend from the writer’s childhood, who brings his own unexpected bearing to the story. Compared by critics to Proust, Mann, and Joyce, this sensuous tour de force is “unquestionably a masterpiece” (The New Republic)