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: Hyped Book You Skipped on in the Past

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: Untold Night and Day
Author: Bae Suah
Translator (From Korean): Deborah Smith
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Publishing Date: 2020 (2013)
No. of Pages: 152

Synopsis: 

It’s twenty-eight-year-old Ayami’s final day at her box-office job in Seoul’s only audio theater for the blind. The theater is shutting down and Ayami’s future is uncertain.

Her last shift completed, Ayami walks the streets of the city with her former boss late into the night, searching for a mutual friend who is missing. Their conversations take in art, love, food, and the inaccessible country to the north. The next day, Ayami acts as a guide for a detective novelist visiting from abroad. Almost immediately, in the heat of Seoul at the height of the summer, order gives way to chaos as the edges of reality start to fray. Ayami enters a world of increasingly tangled threads, and the past intrudes upon the present as overlapping realities repeat, collide, change, and reassert themselves.

Blisteringly original, Untold Night and Day upends the very structure of fiction and narrative storytelling and burns itself upon the soul of the reader. By one of the boldest and most innovative voices in contemporary Korean literature, and masterfully realized in English by Man Booker International Prize-winning translator Deborah Smith, Bae Suah’s hypnotic novel asks whether more than one version of ourselves can exist at one, demonstrating the malleable nature of reality as we know it.

Title: The Inheritance of Loss
Author: Kiran Desai
Publisher: Grove Press
Publishing Date: 2006
No. of Pages: 358

Synopsis: 

In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas lives an embittered judge who wants only to retire in peace, when his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, arrives on his doorstep. The judge’s cook watches over her distractedly, for his thoughts are often on his son, Biju, who is hopscotching from one gritty New York restaurant to another. Kiran Desai’s brilliant novel, published to huge acclaim, is a story of joy and despair. Her characters face numerous choices that majestically illuminate the consequences of colonialism as it collides with the modern world.

Title: Chocolat
Author: Joanne Harris
Publisher: Black Swan
Publishing Date: 2019 (1999)
No. of Pages: 372

Synopsis: 

Try me… Test me… Taste me

In the small French village of Lansquenet, nothing much has changed in a hundred years. Then an exotic stranger, Vianne Rocher, blows in on the changing wind with her small daughter, and opens a chocolate boutique directly opposite the church. Soon the villagers cannot keep away, for Vianne can divine their most hidden desires.

But it’s the beginning of Lent, the season of abstinence, and Father Reynaud denounces her as a serious moral danger to his flock. Perhaps even a with…

It is twenty years since Joanne Harris first wrote about Vianne Rocher in the much-loved Chocolat. She returned to Vianne’s story in The Lollipop Shoes and Peaches for Monsieur Le Curé, and now in her new novel The Strawberry Thief.

Title: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
Author: John Boyne
Publisher: Ember
Publishing Date: 2016 (2006)
No. of Pages: 216

Synopsis: 

When Bruno returns home from school one day, he discovered that his belongings are being packed in crates. His father has received a promotion and the family must move to a new house far, far away, where there is no one to play with and nothing to do. A tall fence stretches as far as the eye can see and cuts him off from the strange people in the distance.

But Bruno decides that there must be more to this desolate place than meets the eye. While exploring his new environment, he meets a boy whose life and circumstances are very different from his own, and their meeting results in a friendship that has devastating consequences.

Since its first publication ten years ago, this powerful and unforgettable story has touched millions of readers around the world.

Title: The Bridges of Madison County
Author: Robert James Waller
Publisher: Warner Books
Publishing Date: 1992
No. of Pages: 171

Synopsis: 

 He noticed all of her…

He could have walked out on this earlier, could still walk. Rationality shrieked at him. “Let it go, Kincaid, get back on the road. Shoot the bridges, go to India. Stop in Bangkok on the way and look up the silk merchant’s daughter who knows every ecstatic secret the old ways can teach. Swim naked with her at dawn in jungle pools and listen to her scream as you turn her inside out at twilight. Let go of this” – the voice was hissing now – “it’s outrunning you.”

But the slow street tango had begun. Somewhere it played; he could hear it, an old accordion. It was far back, or far ahead, he couldn’t be sure. Yet it moved toward him steadily. And the sound of it blurred his criteria and funneled his own alternatives toward unity. Inexorably it did that, until there was nowhere left to go, except toward Francesca Johnson.

Title: The Art of Racing in the Rain
Author: Garth Stein
Publisher: Harper Books
Publishing Date: 2009
No. of Pages: 321

Synopsis: 

Enzo knows he is different from other dogs: a philosopher with a nearly human soul (and an obsession with opposable thumbs), he has educated himself by watching television extensively, and by listening very closely to the words of his master, Denny Swift, an up-and-coming race car driver.

Through Denny, Enzo has gained tremendous insight into the human condition, and he sees that life, like racing, isn’t simply about going fast. On the eve of his death, Enzo takes stock of his life, recalling all that he and his family have been through.

A heart-wrenching but deeply funny and ultimately uplifting story of family, love, loyalty, and hope, The Art of Racing in the Rain is a beautifully crafted and captivating look at the wonders and absurdities of human life … as only a dog could tell it.