Time flies fast. Just like that, we are already in the seventh month of the year. The first half of the year zoomed past us. I hope the year’s first half has been good and kind to everyone. I hope that the remainder of the year will be brimming with good news, blessings, and positive energy. More importantly, I hope everyone will be healthy, in mind, body, and spirit. In terms of reading, June has been an extension of my foray into the works of European literature, a journey I commenced back in May. July will most likely be the same as I still have several works of European writers in queue. Further, several books were written by European writers in my reading challenges.

Before I bid June goodbye, let me share the books I have acquired during the month. As prolific as my reading journey is my book hauling. I was able to obtain several titles I have been looking forward to for some time and some titles that have piqued my interest. I totally ignored my New Year’s resolution of reading more and buying less. Yet again. There are just too many wonderful titles out there waiting to be explored. Or I simply cannot resist wanting to read more. Without ado, here are the books I obtained during the month. Happy reading!

Title: Butter
Author: Asako Yuzuki
Translator (from Japanese): Polly Barton
Publisher: Ecco Books
Publishing Date: 2024 (2017)
No. of Pages: 452

Synopsis:

There are two things I simply cannot tolerate: feminists and margarine.

Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in the Tokyo Detention House convicted of the serial murders of only businessmen, whom she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cooking. The case has captured the nation’s imagination, but Kajii refuses to speak with the pres, entertaining no visitors. That is until journalist Rika Machida writers a letter asking for her recipe for beef stew, and Kajii can’t resist writing back.

Rika, the only woman in her news office, works late each night, rarely cooking more than ramen. As the visits unfold between her and the steely Kajii, they are closer to a master class in food than journalistic research. Rika hopes this gastronomic exchange will help her soften Kajii, but it seems that Rika might be the one changing. With each meal she eats, something is awakening in her body. Do she and Kajii have more in common than she once thought?

Inspired by the real case of a convicted con woman and serial killer – the “Konkatsu Killer” – Asaku Yuzuki’s Butter is a vivid unsettling exploration of misogyny, obsession, romance, and the transgressive pleasures of food in Japan.

Title: The Historian
Author: Elizabeth Kostova
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Publishing Date: 2005
No. of Pages: 642

Synopsis: 

Late one night, exploring her father’s library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters. The letters are all addressed to “My dear and unfortunate successor,” and they plunge her into a world she never dreamed of – a labyrinth where the secrets of her father’s past and her mother’s mysterious fate connect to an inconceivable evil hidden in the depths of history.

The letters provide links to one of the darkest powers that humanity has ever known – and to a centuries-long quest to find the source of that darkness and wipe it out. It is a quest for the truth about Vlad the Impaler, the medieval ruler whose barbarous reign formed the basis of the legend of Dracula. Generations of historians have risked their reputations, their sanity, and even their lives to learn the truth about Vlad the Impaler and Dracula. Now one young woman must decide whether to take up this quest herself – to follow her father in a hunt that nearly brought him to ruin years ago, when he was a vibrant young scholar and her mother was still alive.

What does the legend of Vlad the Impaler have to do with the modern world? Is it possible that the Dracula of myth truly existed – and that he has lived on, century after century, pursuing his own unknowable ends? The answers to these questions cross time and borders, as first the father and then the daughter search for clues, from dusty Ivy League libraries to Istanbul, Budapest, and the depths of Eastern Europe. In city after city, in monasteries and archives, in letters and in secret conversations, the horrible truth emerges about Vlad the Impaler’s dark reign – and about a time-defying pact that may have kept his awful work alive down through the ages.

Parsing obscure signs and hidden texts, treading codes worked into the fabric of medieval monastic traditions – and evading the unknown adversaries who will go to any lengths to conceal and protect Vlad’s ancient powers – one woman comes over closer to the secret of her own past and a confrontation with the very definition of evil. Elizabeth Kostova’s debut novel is an adventure of monumental proportions, a relentless tak=le that blends fact and fantasy, history and the present, with an assurance that is almost unbearably suspenseful – and utterly unforgettable.

Title: Fellowship Point
Author: Alice Elliott Dark
Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books
Publishing Date: 2022
No. of Pages: 576

Synopsis:

A decades-long friendship between two vastly different women is tested in the twilight of their lives.

Celebrated children’s author Agnes Lee is determined to secure her legacy – to complete the final volume of her Franklin Square series of novels, and to permanently protect Fellowship Point, the majestic coastal Maine peninsula where she has spent all seventy-nine summers of her life. To donate the land to a trust, Agnes must convince the remaining shareholders, including her lifelong best friend and neighbor, Polly Wister, to agree to the plan. But Polly’s sons have their own vision for the land. forcing Polly to choose between friendship and family.

Agnes’s efforts are further complicated when an enterprising young book editor, Maud Silver, sets out to convince Agnes to write a memoir. Agnes’s resistance cannot prevent long-held regrets and secrets from coming to light, with far-reaching consequences for all involved.

Fellowship Point reads like a classic nineteenth-century novel in its beautifully woven, multilayered narrative, but it is entirely contemporary in the themes it explores: a deep and empathic interest in women’s lives; the repercussions of class; the struggle to protect the natural world; and a reckoning with intimacy, history, and posterity. It is a masterwork from Alice Elliott Dark, the award-winning author of In the Gloaming.

Title: James
Author: Percival Everett
Publisher: Double Day
Publishing Date: 2024
No. of Pages: 303

Synopsis: 

When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim’s agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.

Title: Real Americans
Author: Rachel Khong
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Publishing Date: 2024
No. of Pages: 395

Synopsis:

Real Americans in New York City on the precipice of Y2K, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew, who is everything she’s not: posted, confident, and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Raised in Tampa, Lily is the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite their differences, Lily and Matthew fall in love.

In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen feels like an outsider on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can’t shake the sense she’s hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the quest threatens to raise more questions than it provides answers.

In immersive, moving prose, Rachel Khong weaves a profound tale of class and striving, race and visibility, and family and inheritance – a story of trust, forgiveness, and finally coming home. Real Americans examines the forces that roil our new century: Are we destined or made? And, if the latter, who gets to do the making?

Title: China Rich Girlfriend
Author: Kevin Kwan
Publisher: Anchor Books
Publishing Date: May 2016 (2015)
No. of Pages: 479

Synopsis: 

It’s the eve of Rachel Chu’s wedding, and she should be over the moon. She has a flawless oval-cut diamond, a wedding dress she loves, and a fiance willing to thwart his meddling relatives and give up one of the biggest fortunes in Asia in order to marry her. Still, Rachel mourns the fact that her birth father, a man she never knew, won’t be there to walk her down the aisle.

Then a chance accident reveals his identity. Suddenly, Rachel is drawn into a dizzying world of Shanghai splendor, a world where people attend church in a penthouse, where exotic cars race down the boulevard, and where people aren’t just crazy rich… they’re China rich.

Title: The Golden Son
Author: Shilpi Somaya Gowda
Publisher: William Morrow
Publishing Date: 2016 (2010)
No. of Pages: 392

Synopsis:

Anil is the cherished eldest son of a large family from an Indian village, expected to inherit the role of leader of his clan and arbiter of its disputes. Leena is his closest companion, a fiercely brave girl who loves nothing more than the wild terrain they inhabit and her dear parents. As childhood friends, they are inseparable, with one of those rare relationships that transcends circumstance and the inequalities of life. But with the pressures and complications of adulthood, their paths begin to diverge. Anil journeys to America to pursue his dream of becoming a medical doctor, finding both temptation and trial at a gritty urban hospital in Dallas, Texas. In India, Leena leaves her beloved home to join her new husband in a distant village, to discover her new family has unexpected complications.

Anil and Leena struggle to come to terms with their identities thousands of miles apart. Many years later, their lives intersect once again. Altered by their choices and experiences, these two old friends are reunited when they need each other most. A tender and bittersweet story of friendship and family, The Golden Son illuminates the decisions we must make to find our true selves.

Title: Ravelstein
Author: Saul Bellow
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 2001 (2000)
No. of Pages: 233

Synopsis: 

Abe Ravelstein – ferocious intellectual, bestselling author, confidant of presidents and prime ministers and possessor of tastes that would bankrupt a king – is celebrating his success in Paris. He and his friend Chick trawl the Parisian streets in search of haute couture, fine foods and fresh arguments. But Ravelstein is dying and, in challenging Chick to record his life, he sets in motion their last great debate.

A tale of philosophy, love, friendship, ancient Greek recipes, mortality, vaudeville routines and $4,500 suits ensues as the two old rogues come to scrutinize their very existence.

Saul Bellow’s first novel for 13 years is an insightful, brave and funny funeral song to friendship and life.

Title: From Heaven Lake
Author: Vikram Seth
Publisher: Vintage Books
Publishing Date: 1987 (1983)
No. of Pages: 178

Synopsis:

In 1981, after two years as a graduate student at Nanjing University, Vikram Seth decided to save money and hitchhike home to New Delhi via Tibet. Small, definitely not Occidental in appearance, and fluent in Chinese, he wore the traditional blue trousers, jacket and visored cap and was sometimes, at first, taken for a Chinese. He proved to be an observant, irrepressible, and resourceful traveler who took in his stride battles with the Communist bureaucracy, climatic extremes and the amiable but agonizing discomfort of riding long distances in bad weather over inferior or nonexistent roads in antiquated trucks. His persuasiveness and almost perfect Chinese enabled him to hold candid conversations with the people he met – and to reach his destination safely.

Title: NW
Author: Zadie Smith
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 2013 (2012)
No. of Pages: 401

Synopsis: 

This is the story of a city. The northwest corner of a city. Here you’ll find guests and hosts, those with power and those without it, people who live somewhere special and others who live nowhere at all. And many people in between.

Every city is like this. Cheek-by-jowl living. Separate worlds.

And then there are the visitations: the rare times a stranger crosses a threshold without permission or warning, causing disruption in the whole system. Like the April afternoon a woman came to Leah Hanwell’s door, seeking help, disturbing the peace, forcing Leah out of her isolation….

Zadie Smith’s brilliant tragicomic novel follows four Londoners – Leah, Natalie, Fo, and Nathan – as they try to make adult lives outside of Caldwell, the council estate of their childhood. Depicting the modern urban zone – familiar to town dwellers everywhere – NW is a quietly devastating tale of encounters, mercurial and vital, like the city itself.

Title: Swing Time
Author: Zadie Smith
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 2017 (2016)
No. of Pages: 453

Synopsis:

Two brown girls dream of being dancers – but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It’s a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either.

Tracey makes it to the chorus line but struggles with adult life, while her friend leaves the old neighborhood behind. The story moves from London to West Africa, where diaspora tourists travel back in time to find their roots, the women dance just like Tracey – the same twists, the same shakes – and the origins of a profound inequality are not a matter of distant history, but a present dance to the music of time.

Title: The Yacoubian Building
Author: Alaa Al Aswany
Translator (from Arabic): Humphrey Davies
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Publishing Date: 2006 (2002)
No. of Pages: 255

Synopsis: 

All manner of flawed and fragile humanity reside in the Yacoubian Building, a once-elegant temple of Art Deco splendor now slowly decaying in the smog and bustle of downtown Cairo: a fading aristocrat and self-proclaimed “scientist of women”; a sultry, voluptuous siren; a devout young student, feeling the irresistible pull toward fundamentalism; a newspaper editor helplessly in love with a policeman; a corrupt and corpulent politician, twisting the Koran to justify his desires.

These disparate lives careen toward an explosive conclusion in Alaa Al Aswany’s remarkable international bestseller. Teeming with frank sexuality and heartfelt compassion, this book is an important window on to the experience of loss and love in the Arab world.