Woah. Time does fly fast. We are another month down in 2024. We are now in the final stretch of the year. I hope the year has been great and kind to everyone. I hope you have already completed all the goals you set at the start of the year, or at least close to finishing them. I hope your hard work gets repaid as we approach the last quarter of the year. I hope the remainder of the year will shower everyone with blessings, positive news, and good tidings. I hope it will go everyone’s way and everyone’s wishes and prayers will be answered. But before I could wave September goodbye, let me share the book titles I was able to acquire during the month. Because of the receipt of books in transit in previous months, I am featuring more books than usual. As such, I will be dividing it into three parts. This is the second part and it features books published during this decade, i.e., 2020 forward.

Title: My Friends
Author: Hisham Matar
Publisher: Random House
Publishing Date: 2024
No. of Pages: 394

Synopsis:

One evening, as a young boy growing up in Benghazi, Khaled hears a bizarre short story read aloud on the radio, about a man being eaten alive by a cat, and has the sense that his life has been altered forever. Obsessed by the power of those words – and by their enigmatic author, Hosam Zowa – Khaled eventually embarks on a journey that will take him far from home, to pursue a life of the mind at the University of Edinburgh.

There, thrust into an open society that is light-years away from the world he knew in Libya, Khaled begins to change. In London, he attends a protest against the Qaddafi regime, only to watch it explode into tragedy. In a flash, Khaled finds himself injured, clinging to life, and unable to leave Britain, much less return to the country of his birth. To even tell his mother and father back home what he has done, on tapped phone lines, would expose them to danger.

When a chance encounter in a Paris hotel brings him face-to-face with Hosam Zowa, the author of the fateful short story, Khaled is subsumed into the deepest friendship of his life. It is a friendship that not only sustains him but eventually forces him, as the Arab Spring erupts, to confront agonizing tensions between revolution and safety, family and exile, and how to define his own sense of self against those closest to him.

A devastating meditation on friendship and family, and the way in which time tests – and frays – those bonds, My Friends is an achingly beautiful work of literature by an author working at the peak of his powers.

Title: Calling for a Blanket Dance
Author: Oscar Hokeah
Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Publishing Date: 2022
No. of Pages: 255

Synopsis: 

Oscar Hokeah’s electric debut takes us into the life of Ever Geimausaddle, whose family – part Mexican, part Native American – is determined to hold on to their community despite obstacles everywhere they turn. Ever’s father is injured at the hands of corrupt police on the border when he goes to visit family in Mexico, while his mother struggles both to keep her job and care for her husband. And young Ever is lost and angry at all that he doesn’t understand, at this world that seems to undermine his sense of safety. Ever’s relatives all have ideas about who he is and who he should be. His Cherokee grandmother, knowing the importance of proximity, urges the family to move across Oklahoma to be near her, while his grandfather, watching their traditions slip away, tries to reunite Ever with his heritage through traditional gourd dances. Through it all, every relative wants the same: to remind Ever of the rich and supportive communities that surround him, there to hold him tight, and for Ever to learn to take the strength given to him to save not only himself but also the next generation.

How will this young man visualize a place for himself when the world hasn’t made room for him to start with? Honest, heartbreaking, and ultimately uplifting, Calling for a Blanket Dance is the story of how Ever Geimausaddle finds his way home.

Title: This Strange Eventful History
Author: Claire Messud
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company
Publishing Date: 2024
No. of Pages: 423

Synopsis:

Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the pied-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state – separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This Strange Eventful History, told with historical sweep, is above all a family story: of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family’s strangeness; of François’s union with Barbara, a woman so culturally different they can barely comprehend one another; of Chloe, the result of that union, who believes that telling these buried stories will bring them all peace.

Inspired in part by long-ago stories from her own family’s history, Claire Messud animates her characters’ rich interior lives amid the social and political upheaval of the recent past. As profoundly intimate as it is expansive, This Strange Eventful History is a “tour de force. . . one of those rare novels that a reader doesn’t read but lives through with the characters” (Yiyun Li).

Title: The Furrows: An Elegy
Author: Namwali Serpell
Publisher: Hogarth
Publishing Date: 2022
No. of Pages: 266

Synopsis: 

Cassandra Williams – Cee, or C, for short – is twelve; her little brother, Wayne, is seven. One day, when they’re alone together, there is an accident and Wayne is lost forever, his body never recovered. The boy’s disappearance cleaves the family with doubt. Their father moves away and starts another family elsewhere. But their mother can’t give up hope and launches an organization dedicated to missing children.

As C grows older, she sees her brother everywhere: in bistros, airplane aisles, subway cars. Here is her brother’s face, the light in his eyes, the way he seems to recognize her, too. But it can’t be, of course. Or can it? then one day, in another accident, C meets a man both mysterious and familiar, a man who is also searching for someone and for his own place in the world. His name is Wayne.

Namwali Serpell’s remarkable new novel captures the uncanny experience of grief, the way the past breaks over the present like waves in the sea. The Furrows is a bold exploration of memory and mourning that twists unexpectedly into a story of mistaken identity, double consciousness, and the wishful – and sometimes willful – longing for reunion with those we’ve lost.

Title: God’s Ashes: Apocrypha
Author: Marga Ortigas
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 2024
No. of Pages: 295

Synopsis:

A gripping tale of loss, betrayal, and redemption set across the porous maritime borders of Southeast Asia and the remote islands of the Pacific.

In God’s Ashes, an archipelago of displaced characters – refugees, dissidents, and indigents – converge in an unseen transnational crime.

Years later, their hard-won, reshaped identities threaten to crumble when one among them disappears.

The ensuing search could upend the existing world order.

Title: When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East
Author: Quan Barry
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Publishing Date: 2022
No. of Pages: 291

Synopsis: 

Tasked with finding the reincarnation of a great lama – a spiritual teacher who may have been born anywhere in the vast Mongolian landscape – the young monk Chuluun sets out with his identical twin, Mun, who has rejected the monastic life they once shared. Their relationship will be tested on this journey through their homeland, as each possesses the ability to hear the other’s thoughts.

Proving once again that she is a writer of immense range and imagination, Quan Barry carries us across a terrain as unforgiving as it is beautiful and culturally varied, from the western Altai Mountains to the eerie starkness of the Gobi Desert to the ancient capital of Chinggis Khaan. As their country stretches before them, questions of faith – along with more earthly matters of love and brotherhood – haunt the twins.

Are our lives our own, or do we belong to something larger? When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East is a stunningly far-flung examination of our individual struggle to retain our convictions and discover meaning in a fast-changing world, as well as a meditation on accepting what simply is.

Title: Swimming in the Dark
Author: Tomasz Jedrowski
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Publishing Date: 2020
No. of Pages: 229

Synopsis:

Poland, 1980 Shy anxious Ludwik has been sent along with the rest of his university class to an agricultural camp. Here he meets Janusz – and together they spend a dreamlike summer falling in love.

But with summer over, the two are sent back to Warsaw. Confronted by the scrutiny, intolerance and corruption of life under the Party, Ludwik and Janusz must decide how they will survive; and in their different choices, find themselves torn apart.

Title: Four Treasures of the Sky
Author: Jenny Tinghui Zhang
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Publishing Date: 2022
No. of Pages: 318

Synopsis: 

Daiyu never wanted to be like the tragic heroine for whom she was named. But when she is kidnapped and smuggled across an ocean from China to America, Daiyu must relinquish the home and future she imagined for herself. Over the years that follow, she is forced to keep reinventing herself to survive. From a calligraphy school to a San Francisco brothel to a shop tucked in the Idaho mountains, we follow Daiyu on a desperate quest to outrun the tragedy that chases her. As anti-Chinese sentiment sweeps across the country in a wave of unimaginable violence, Daiyu must draw on each of the selves she has been – including the ones she most wants to leave behind – in order to finally claim her own name and story.