Wow. We are down with a third of the year. Home time flies! How has your year been? I hope it has been great and that the rest of the year will be brimming with blessings and positive energy. In terms of reading, the first four months of the year have been prolific. I have read over forty books. I was also able to obtain a score of books. I guess I am setting myself up for failure yet again. A part of my bookish goals and resolutions this year (and every year before this year) is to buy more and read less. Interestingly, for the second month in a row, I was able to obtain fewer books compared to the number of books I read. I hope I get to sustain this. Without ado, here are the books I obtained during the month. Happy reading!

Title: Old God’s Time
Author: Sebastian Barry
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 2024 (2023)
No. of Pages: 261

Synopsis:

Recently retired policeman Tom Kettle is settling into the quiet of his new home, a lean-to annexed to a Victorian castle overlooking the Irish Sea. For months he has barely seen a soul, catching only glimpses of his eccentric landlord and a nervous young mother who has moved in next door. Occasionally, fond memories return of his family: his beloved wife, June, and their two children, Winnie and Joe. But when two former colleagues turn up at his door with questions about a decades-old case, one that Tom never quite came to terms with, he finds himself pulled into the darkest currents of his past. A beautiful, haunting novel in which nothing is quite as it seems, Old God’s Time is about what we live through, what we live with, and what may survive of us.

Title: The Age of Goodbyes
Author: Li Zi Shu
Translator (from Chinese): YZ Chin
Publisher: The Feminist Press
Publishing Date: 2022 (2010)
No. of Pages: 372

Synopsis: 

In 1969, in the wake of Malaysia’s deadliest race riots, a woman named Du Li An secures her place in society by marrying a gangster. In a parallel narrative, a character known only as The Fourth Person explores the work of a writer also named Du Li An. And in a third storyline, written in the second person, “you” are reading a novel titled The Age of Goodbyes. Floundering in the wake of your mother’s death, you are trying to unpack the secrets surrounding your lineage. The winner of multiple awards, and a Taiwanese best seller, this dazzling novel is a profound exploration of what happens to personal memory when official accounts of history distort and render it taboo.

Title: A Girl’s Story
Author: Annie Ernaux
Translator (from French) Alison L. Strayer
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Publishing Date: 2020 (2016)
No. of Pages: 156

Synopsis:

In A Girl’s Story, Annie Ernaux revisits the season fifty years earlier when she found herself overpowered by another’s will and desire. In the summer of 1958, eighteen-year-old Ernaux submits her will to a man’s and then he moves on, leaving her without a “master,” bereft. Now, fifty years later, she finds herself able to obliterate the intervening years and return to consider this young woman that she had long wanted to forget completely. And to discover that here, submerged in shame, humiliation, and betrayal, but also in self-discovery and self-reliance, lies the origin of her writing life.

Title: Monsieur Pain
Author: Roberto Bolaño
Translator (from Spanish): Chris Andrews
Publisher: Picador
Publishing Date: 2011 (1999)
No. of Pages: 134

Synopsis: 

César Vallejo, renowned Peruvian poet, lies dying in hospital – he’s hiccupping himself to death. When the doctors struggle to offer a diagnosis, his wife pins her hopes on the mesmerist and reclusive bachelor Pierre Pain. But after the appearance of two mysterious Spaniards, Monsieur Pain finds access to the hospital barred and things soon go awry…

Set in the rainy, crepuscular streets of an unsettled 1938 Paris, Monsieur Pain merges the best of Borges with Edgar Allan Poe, and its dark blend of unrequited desire, guilt, tried, and betrayal makes this a gripping noir conspiracy as rich as it is strange.

Title: Amulet
Author: Roberto Bolaño
Translator (from Spanish): Chris Andrews
Publisher: Picador
Publishing Date: 2010 (2006)
No. of Pages: 184

Synopsis:

Auxilio Lacouture is trapped. For twelve days she hides alone in a lavatory on the fourth floor of the university. Staring at the floor, she begins a heartfelt and feverish tale; she is the mother of Mexican poetry.

This highly charged first-person semi-hallucinatory novel is a potent stream of consciousness through which the poets of Mexico rage and swirl. Filled with wild, dark literary prophecies, heroic poets, mad poets, artists ‘choked by the brilliance of youg’, Auxlio’s passionate narration – both heart-breaking and lyrical – is suffused with the essence of Bolaño’s art.

Title: Innocent Eréndira 
Author: Gabriel García Márquez
Translator (from Spanish): Gregory Rabassa
Publisher: Picador
Publishing Date: 1981 (1978)
No. of Pages: 126

Synopsis: 

These stories in this latest collection were written over a span of twenty–five years. The earlier stories are among the first García Márquez ever wrote; the latest and longest the title story, takes up a theme mentioned in passing in the classic One Hundred Years of Solitude – the tale of a young girl who accidentally burns down the house of her grandmother, and is forced into a life of prostitution and slavery to repay her debt. All the stories display the authentic voice of Gabriel García Márquez’s genius.