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: Over 400 pages

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: Giants in the Earth
Author: O. E. Rölvaag
Translator: Lincoln Colcord and O. E. Rölvaag
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Publishing Date: 1999
No. of Pages: 531

Synopsis: 

The classic story of a Norwegian pioneer family’s struggles with the land and the elements of the Dakota Territory as they try to make a new life in America.

Title: Sabbath’s Theater
Author: Philip Roth
Publisher: Vintage
Publishing Date: 1996
No. of Pages: 451

Synopsis: 

Sabbath’s Theater is a comic creation of epic proportions, and Mickey Sabbath is its gargantuan hero. Once a scandalously inventive puppeteer, Sabbath at sixty-four is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous. But after the death of his long-time mistress—an erotic free spirit whose adulterous daring surpassed even his own—Sabbath embarks on a turbulent journey into his past. Bereft and grieving, besieged by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him most, he contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: Light in August
Author: William Faulkner
Publisher: Vintage International
Publishing Date: October 1990
No. of Pages: 507

Synopsis: 

Light in August, a novel about hopeful perseverance, features some of Faulkner’s most memorable characters: guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, in search of the father of her unborn child; Reverend Gail Hightower, plagued by visions; and Joe Christmas, a desperate, enigmatic drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry.

Title: The Great Swindle
Author: Pierre Lemaitre
Translator (from French): Frank Wynne
Publisher: MacLehose Press
Publishing Date: 2015
No. of Pages: 439

Synopsis: 

October 1918: the war on the Western Front is all but over. Desperate for one last chance of promotion, an ambitious lieutenant, Henri d’Aulnay Pradelle, sends two scouts over the top of the trenches, and contrives to shoot them in the back to incite his men to heroic action once more.

And so is set in motion a series of shocking events that will bind together the fates and fortunes of Pradelle and the two soldiers who discover his crime: Albert Maillard and Edouard Péricourt.

Back in civilian life, Albert and Edouard find themselves in a society whose reverence for its dead cannot quite match its resentment for those who survived. Penniless, morphine-dependent, cut-off from their families, psychologically and physically destroyed by their wartime experience, the two soldiers conspire to enact an audacious form of revenge against the country that abandoned them to penury and despair, with a scheme to swindle the whole of France on an epic scale.

Set amid the ruins of one of the most brutal conflicts of the modern era, this is a devastating portrait of the darker side of post-war France with all her villains, cowards, and clowns, revealing the unbearable tragedy of the lost generation.

Title: Thus Bad Begins
Author: Javier Marias
Translator (from Spanish): Margaret Jull Costa
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Publishing Date: 2016
No. of Pages: 444

Synopsis: 

From the internationally renowned author of The Infatuations comes the mesmerizing story of a couple living in the shadow of a mysterious and unhappy history – a novel about the cruel, tender punishments we exact on those we love.

Madrid, 1980. Juan de Vere nearly finished with his university degree, takes a job as personal assistant to Eduardo Muriel, an eccentric film director. Urbane, discreet, irreproachable, Muriel is an irresistible idol to the young man. But Muriel’s voluptuous wife, Beatriz, inhabits their home like an unwanted ghost; and on the periphery of their lives is Dr. Jorge Van Vechten, a family friend implicated in unsavory rumors that Muriel now asks Juan to investigate. As Juan draws closer to the truth, he uncovers only more questions. What is at the root of Muriel’s hostility toward his wife? How did Beatriz meet Van Vechten? What happened during and after the war? Marias leads us deep into the intrigues of these characters, through a daring exploration of rancor, suspicion, loyalty, trust, and the infinitely permeable boundaries between the deceptions perpetrated by others and those we inflict upon ourselves.