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: Title Starting with an ‘A’

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 ABC Murders
Author: Agatha Christie
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publishing Date: 2018
No. of Pages: 266

Synopsis: 

Murder is a very simple crime. But in the hands of a maniac, a serial killer, it becomes a very complicated business.

With the whole country in a state of panic, the killer is growing more confident with each successive execution – Mrs. Ascher in Andover, Betty Barnard in Bexhill, Sir Carmicheal Clarke in Churston… But laying a trail of deliberate clues to taunt the proud Hercule Poirot might just be his first mistake.

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: Alias Grace
Author: Margaret Atwood
Publisher: Virago
Publishing Date: 1998
No. of Pages: 542

Synopsis: 

Sometimes I whisper it over to myself: Murderess. Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt along the floor” Grace Marks. Female fiend? Femme fatale? Or weak and unwilling victim?

Around the true story of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the 1840s, Margaret Atwood has created an extraordinarily potent tale of sexuality, cruelty and mystery.

Title: America is Not the Heart
Author: Elaine Castillo
Publisher: Atlantic Fiction
Publishing Date: 2018
No. of Pages: 406

Synopsis: 

How many lives can one person lead in a single lifetime? When Hero De Vera arrives in America, disowned by her parents in the Philippines, she’s already on her third. Her uncle, Pol, who has offered her a fresh start and a place to stay, knows not to ask about the first and second, and his younger wife, Paz, has learned enough about the might and secrecy of the De Vera family to keep her head down. Only their seven-year-old daughter, Roni, asks Hero why her hands seem to scream with hurt at the steering wheel of the car she drives to collect her from school, and only Rosalyn, the fierce but open-hearted beautician, has any hope of bringing Hero back from the dead.

Title: The Angel’s Game
Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Translator (from Spanish): Lucia Graves
Publisher: Phoenix
Publishing Date: 2009 (2008)
No. of Pages: 441

Synopsis: 

In an abandoned mansion in the heart of Barcelona, a young man, David Martin makes his living by writing sensationalist novels under a pseudonym. The survivor of a troubled childhood, he spends his nights spinning baroque tales about the city’s underworld. But perhaps his dark imaginings are not as strange as they seem, for in a locked room deep within the house lie photographs and letters hinting at an unsolved mystery.

Like a slow poison, the history of the place and an impossible love brings David close to despair. But then he receives a letter from a reclusive French editor who makes him the offer of a lifetime. He is to write a book unlike any other – a book with the power to change hearts and minds. In return, he will receive a fortune, perhaps more. But as David begins the work, he realises that there is a connection between this haunting book and the shadows that surround his home…

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.