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: Title Starting with a ‘U’

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: Under the Eye of the Big Bird
Author: Hiromi Kawakami
Translator (from Japanese): Asa Yoneda
Publisher: Soft Skull
Publishing Date: 2024 (2016)
No. of Pages: 278

Synopsis: 

In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small tribes across the planet under the observation and care of “Mothers.” Some children are made in factories from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the race depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings – but is is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world.

Unfolding over fourteen interconnected episodes spanning geological eons, at once technical and pastoral, mournful and topic, Under the Eye of the Big Bird presents an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it.

Title: Underworld
Author: Don DeLillo
Publisher: Scribner
Publishing Date: 2003
No. of Pages: 827

Synopsis: 

Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life; she is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.

Underworld is a story of men and women together and apart, seen in deep, clear detail and in stadium-sized panoramas, shadowed throughout by the overarching conflict of the Cold War. It is a novel that accepts every challenge of these extraordinary times – Don DeLillo’s greatest and most powerful work of fiction.

Title: Under the Feet of Jesus
Author: Helena Maria Viramontes
Publisher: Plume Books
Publishing Date: April 1996
No. of Pages: 180

Synopsis: 

This exquisitely sensitive novel has the tensile strength of steel as it captures the conflict of cultures, the bitterness of wants, the sweetness of love, and the landscape of the human heart. At the center of this powerful tale is Estrella, a girl about to cross the perilous border to womanhood. What she knows of life comes from her mother, who has survived abandonment by her husband in a land that treats her as if she were invisible, even though she and her children pick the crops of the farms that feed its people. But within Estrella, seeds of growth and change are stirring. And in the arms of Alejo, they burst into a full, fierce flower as she tastes the joy and pain of first love. Pushed to the margins of society, she learns to fight back and is able to help the young farmworker she loves when his ambitions and very life are threatened in a harvest of death. Infused with the beauty of the California landscape and shifting splendors of the passing seasons juxtaposed with the bleakness of poverty, this vividly imagined novel is worthy of the people it celebrates and whose story it tells so magnificently. The simple, lyrical beauty of Viramontes’s prose, her haunting use of image and metaphor, and the urgency of her themes all announce Under the Feet of Jesus as a landmark work of American fiction.

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: An Unsuitable Attachment
Author: Barbara Pym
Publisher: Perennial Library
Publishing Date: 1986 (January 1, 1982)
No. of Pages: 256

Synopsis: 

This wry comedy of manners – Barbara Pym’s seventh novel and the last one she wrote before a fifteen-year silence, when she gave up writing novels altogether, a hiatus broken only in 1977 – is set in the parish of St. Basil’s Church n a slightly unfashionable quarter of London. The vicar, Mark Ainger, his wife Sophia, her sister Penelope, a new arrival to the parish named Rupert Stonebird, and a gentlewoman named Ianthe Broome fret over improbable attachments and embark on a holiday to Rome that will prove decisive to them all.

Title: Untouchable
Author: Mulk Raj Anand
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: July 3, 1990
No. of Pages: 157

Synopsis: 

‘It recalled to me very vividly the occasions I have walked “the wrong way” in an Indian city, and it is a way down which no novelist has yet taken me…’

So wrote E.M. Forster in 1934, championing Mulk Raj Anand’s finest and most controversial novel. Here Anand conveys precisely, with urgency and barely disguised fury, what it feels to be one of India’s Untouchables. Bakha is a young man, a proud and even an attractive young man, but none the less he is an outcast in a system that is now only slowly changing and was then as cruel and debilitating as that of apartheid. Into this re-creation of one day in the life of Bakha, sweeper and latrine-cleaner, Anand poured a vitality, fire and richness of detail that have caused him to be acclaimed as his country’s Charles Dickens as well as this century’s greatest revealer of the ‘other’ India.