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 last part and it features all other books that were neither translated nor published this decade.

Title: Wolf Hall
Author: Hilary Mantel
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Publishing Date: 2009
No. of Pages: 650

Synopsis:

England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe oppose him. The quest for the petulant king’s freedom destroys his advisor, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum and a deadlock.

Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a bully and a charmer, Cromwell has broken all the rules of a rigid society in his rise to power, and is prepared to break some more. Rising from the ashes of personal disaster – the loss of his young family and of Wolsey, his beloved patron – he picks his way deftly through a court where ‘man is wolf to man.’ Pitting himself against parliament, the political establishment and the papacy, he is prepared to reshape England to his own and Henry’s desires.

From one of our finest living writers, Wolf Hall is that very rare thing: a truly great English novel, one that explores the intersection of individual psychology and wider politics. With a vast array of characters, and richly overflowing with incident, it peels back history to show us Tudor England as a half-made society, moulding itself with great passion and suffering and courage.

Title: Home
Author: Marilynne Robinson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publishing Date: 2008
No. of Pages: 325

Synopsis: 

Hundreds of thousand of readers were enthralled and delighted by the luminous, tender voice of John Ames in Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Home is an entirely independent, deeply affecting work that takes place concurrently in the same Iowa town, this time in the household of Reverend Robert Boughton, Ames’s closest friend.

Glory Boughton, age thirty-eight, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Soon her brother Jack – the prodigal son of the family, gone twenty years – comes home, too, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with a past littered with trouble and pain. Jack is on e of the great characters in recent literature. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold a job, he is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton’s mot beloved child. Brilliant, lovable, and wayward, Jack forges an intense bond with Glory and engages painfully with John Ames, his godfather and namesake.

Home is a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, and the passing of generation, about love and death and faith. It is Robinson’s greatest work, an unforgettable embodiment of the deepest and most universal emotions.

Title: The Magus
Author: John Fowles
Publisher: Vintage Classics
Publishing Date: 2004 (1966)
No. of Pages: 656

Synopsis:

On a remote Greek Island, Nicholas Urfe finds himself embroiled in the deceptions of a master trickster. As reality and illusion intertwine, Urfe is caught up in the darkest of psychological games.

John Fowles expertly unfolds a tale that is lush with overpowering imagery in a spellbinding exploration of the complexities of the human mind. By turns disturbing, thrilling and seductive, The Magus is a cerebral feast.

Title: Inland
Author: Téa Obreht
Publisher: Random House
Publishing Date: 2019
No. of Pages: 370

Synopsis: 

In the lawless, drought-ridden lands of the Arizona Territory in 1893, two extraordinary lives collide. Nora is an unflinching frontierswoman awaiting the return of the men in her life – her husband, who has gone in search of water for the parched household, and her elder sons, who have vanished after an exploding argument. Nora is biding her time with her youngest son, who is convinced that a mysterious beast is stalking the land around their home.

Lurie is a former outlaw and a man haunted by ghosts. He sees lost souls who want something from him, and he finds reprieve from their longing in an unexpected relationship that inspires a momentous expedition across the West. The way in which Nora’s and Lurie’s stories intertwine is the surprise and suspense of this brilliant novel.

Mythical, lyrical, and sweeping in scope, Inland is grounded in true but little-known history. It showcases all of Téa Obreht’s talents as a writer, as she subverts and reimagines the myths of the American West, making them entirely – and unforgettably – her own.

Title: An Equal Music
Author: Vikram Seth
Publisher: Phoenix House
Publishing Date: 1999
No. of Pages: 381

Synopsis:

Vikram Seth occupies a genre of his own. No two books of his have been alike, and yet each has borne the hallmark of its author: the ‘unmistakable breath of life’ as one critic described it, ‘unassailable truthfulness’ in the words of another. In An Equal Music, his first novel since A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth returns with a story both intricate and intimate, rich with music, art, humour and emotion.

On one level, it is a story about love, love of a woman lost and found and lost again. A chance sighting on a London bus, a letter which should never have been read, a pianist with a secret that touches the heart of her music: from a multiplicity of details, Vikram Seth once again creates the illusion of life. It is also a book about music and about how the love of music can run like a passionate theme through a life. Above all, it is a book to savour and re-read. By turns elegiac and witty, it introduces the readers to another facet of Vikram Seth’s unique talent.

Title: The Shadow King
Author: Maaza Mengiste
Publisher: Canongate
Publishing Date: 2020 (2019)
No. of Pages: 424

Synopsis: 

Ethiopia, 1935.

With the threat of Mussolini’s army looming, recently orphaned Hirut struggles to adapt to her new life as a maid. Her new employer, Kidane, an officer in Emperor Haile Selassie’s army, rushes to mobilise his strongest men before the Italians invade.

Hirut and the other women long to do more than care for the wounded and bury the dead. When the Emperor goes into exile and Ethiopia quickly loses hope, it is Hirut who offers a plan to maintain morale. But how could she have predicted her own personal war is still to come, as a prisoner of one of Italy’s most vicious officers?