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: Halloween Freebie

I couldn’t think of a Halloween-related subject, so I picked immigrants instead. I learned that today is National Immigrants Day in the United States.

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: America is Not the Heart
Author: Elaine Castillo
Publisher: Atlantic Fiction
Publishing Date: 2018
No. of Pages: 406

Synopsis: 

How many lives can one person lead in a single lifetime? When Hero De Vera arrives in America, disowned by her parents in the Philippines, she’s already on her third. Her uncle, Pol, who has offered her a fresh start and a place to stay, knows not to ask about the first and second, and his younger wife, Paz, has learned enough about the might and secrecy of the De Vera family to keep her head down. Only their seven-year-old daughter, Roni, asks Hero why her hands seem to scream with hurt at the steering wheel of the car she drives to collect her from school, and only Rosalyn, the fierce but open-hearted beautician, has any hope of bringing Hero back from the dead.

Title: The Beekeeper of Aleppo
Author: Christy Lefteri
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Publishing Date: 2020
No. of Pages: 307

Synopsis: 

Every morning, Nuri the beekeeper rises early to hear the call to prayer before driving to his hives in the countryside. On weekends, his wife Afra, a gifted artist, sells her paintings at the open-air market in the square. They live simply, rich in family and friends, in the hills of the beautiful Syrian city of Aleppo – until the unthinkable happens. When all they love is destroyed by war, Nuri knows they have no choice except to leave their home. But escaping Syria will be no easy task: Afra has lost her sight, leaving Nuri to navigate her grief as well as a perilous journey toward an uncertain future in Britain.

Moving, intimate, and beautifully written, this is a story for our times: It reminds us that our lives can be upended instantly – and brings a journey in faraway lands close to home, never to be forgotten.

Title: Homeland Elegies
Author: Ayad Akhtar
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Publishing Date: May 2021
No. of Pages: 343

Synopsis: 

A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at tis heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home.

Ayad Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrants live in fear, and where the nation’s unhealed wounds wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerrilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one – least of all himself – in the process.

Title: Dogeaters
Author: Jessica Hagedorn
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 1991
No. of Pages: 251

Synopsis: 

Welcome to Manila in the turbulent period of the Philippine’s late dictator. It is a world in which American pop culture and local Filipino tradition mix flamboyantly, and gossip, storytelling, and extravagant behavior thrive.

A wildly disparate group of characters—from movie stars to waiters, from a young junkie to the richest man in the Philippines—becomes caught up in a spiral of events culminating in a beauty pageant, a film festival, and an assassination. In the center of this maelstrom is Rio, a feisty schoolgirl who will grow up to live in America and look back with longing on the land of her youth.

Title: The Last Gift
Author: Abdulrazak Gurnah
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Publishing Date: May 2012
No. of Pages: 279

Synopsis: 

Abbas has never told anyone about his past – before he was a sailor on the high seas, before he met his wife Maryam in Exeter, before they settled into a quiet life in Norwich with their children, Jamal and Hanna. Now, at the age of sixty-three, he suffers a collapse that renders him bedbound and unable to speak about things he thought he would one day have to.

Jamal and Hanna have grown up and gone out into the world, yet while they were both born in England, they cannot shake a sense of apartness. When Abbas falls ill, they return home reluctantly to confront the dark silences of their father and the secret he has been hiding from them all.

Title: The Year of the Runaways
Author: Sunjeev Sahota
Publisher: Picador
Publishing Date: 2015
No. of Pages: 468

Synopsis: 

Three young men from very different backgrounds come together in a journey from India to England, where they hope to begin something new. To support their families, where they can, to build their future, to show their worth, to escape the past. They have almost no idea of what awaits them.

In a dilapidated shared house in Sheffield, Tarlochan, a former rickshaw driver, will say nothing about his life in Bihar. Avtar has a secret that binds him to the unpredictable Randeep. Randeep, in turn, has a visa-wife in a flat on the other side of town, whose cupboards are full of her husband’s clothes, in case the immigration men surprise her with a visit.

She is Narinder, and her story is the most surprising of them all.

Utterly absorbing and beautiful in its scope, The Year of the Runaways is written with compassion and touched by grace. As Tochi, Avtar, Randeep and Narinder negotiate their dreams, desires and shocking realities, as their histories continue to pull at them, as the seasons pass, what emerges is a novel of overwhelming humanity: one which asks how far we can decide our own course in life, and what we should do for love, for faith, and for family.