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: Already Bought

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: Sons and Lovers
Author: D.H. Lawrence
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publishing Date: 1998
No. of Pages: 474

Synopsis: 

Lawrence’s first major novel was also the first in the English language to explore ordinary working-class life from the inside. No writer before or since has written so well about the intimacies enforced by a tightly knit mining community and by a family where feelings are never hidden for long. When the marriage between Walter Morel and his sensitive, high-minded wife begins to break down, the bitterness of their frustration seeps into their children’s lives. Their second son, Paul, knows that he must struggle for independence if he is not to repeat his parents’ failure.

Lawrence’s powerful description of Paul’s single-minded efforts to define himself sexually and emotionally through relationships with two women – the innocent, old-fashioned Miriam Leivers and the experienced, provocatively modern Clara Dawes – makes this novel as much for the beginning of the twenty first century as it was for the beginning of the twentieth.

Title: If You’re Reading This I’m Already Dead
Author: Andrew Nicoll
Publisher: Quercus
Publishing Date: 2013
No. of Pages: 422

Synopsis: 

Otto was once many things, but now, sitting in his caravan, drinking what is left of his coffee (dust), listening to the Allies rain their bombs on his city, he is simply scared. And so he’s decided to write the story of his life.

It is an extraordinary story, a story about how, with the help of his friends (and a camel), an acrobat of Hamburg became the King of Albania, and fell in love along the way.

Title: The Revenant
Author: Michael Punke
Publisher: Picador
Publishing Date: October 2015
No. of Pages: 252

Synopsis: 

The year is 1823, and the trappers of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company live a brutal frontier life. Hugh Glass is among the company’s finest men, an experienced frontiersman and an expert tracker. But when a scouting mission puts him face-to-face with a grizzly bear, he is viciously mauled and not expected to survive. Two company men are dispatched to stay behind and tend to Glass before he dies. When the men abandon him instead, Glass is driven to survive by one desire: revenge. With shocking grit and determination, Glass sets out, crawling at first, across hundreds of miles of uncharted American frontier. Based on a true story, The Revenant is a remarkable tale of obsession, the human will stretched to its limits and the lengths that one man will go to for retribution.

Title: Solar
Author: Ian McEwan
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
Publishing Date: 2010
No. of Pages: 283

Synopsis: 

Michael Beard is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. A compulsive womanizer, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. But this time it is different: she is having an affair, and he is still in love with her.

When Beard’s professional and personal worlds collide in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself for him to extricate himself from his marital mess, reinvigorate his career and save the world from environmental disaster.

Title: My Antonia
Author: Willa Cather
Publisher: Book-of-the-Month Club, Inc.
Publishing Date: 1995
No. of Pages: 419

Synopsis: 

Her fourth novel, My Antonia (1918), which she thought “the best thing I’ve ever done,” is set in pioneer-era Nebraska and is a story of contrasts – most noticeably the contrast between Antonia Shimerda, the destitute child of Bohemian immigrants, and Jim Burden, a native Virginian who, after being orphaned at the age of ten, is sent to live with his grandparents in Nebraska. The novel traces the parallel lives of Jim and Antonia – Jim (said to be modeled in Cather herself) goes to Harvard, becomes a traveling businessman, and returns to Nebraska infrequently; Antonia elopes with a shiftless railway conductor, comes home disgraced, and finds happiness with Anton Cuzak, a gentle farmer, like Alexandra Bergson of O Pioneers! – and like the land they both call home – Antonia comes to embody unshakeable simplicity and integrity.

Title: A Spot of a Brother
Author: Mark Haddon
Publisher: Vintage
Publishing Date: 2007
No. of Pages: 503

Synopsis: 

At fifty-seven, George is settling down to a comfortable retirement, building a shed in his garden, reading historical novels, listening to a bit of light jazz. Then Katie, his unpredictable daughter, announces that she is getting remarried, to Ray. Her family is not pleased – as her brother Jamie observes, Ray has ‘stranger hands’. Katie can’t decide if she loves Ray, or loves the way he cares for her son Jacob, and her mother Jean is a bit put out by the way the wedding planning gets in the way of her affair with one of her husband’s former colleagues. And the tidy and pleasant life Jamie has created crumbles when he fails to invite his lover, Tonie, to the dreaded nuptials.

Unnoticed in the uproar, George discovers a sinister lesion on his hip, and quietly begins to lose his mind.