Just like that, we are ten months down in 2024. Goodbye and thank you October. I hope the year has been great and kind to everyone. I fervently hope you have already achieved or are on track to achieving all your goals for the year. I hope your hard work gets repaid as we approach the last two months 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 October goodbye, let me share the book titles I was able to acquire during the month. I will be dividing my October book haul into two parts. The first part features books shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. With the announcement of the winner closing in, I was excited to delve into these books; I have already read Percival Everett’s James. Interestingly, I have never read any of the works of the six writers on the shortlist. In fact, it was only Everett who I had heard of before. Regardless, here is the first part of my October book haul.

Title: The Safekeep
Author: Yael van der Wouden
Publisher: Viking
Publishing Date: 2024
No. of Pages: 258

Synopsis:

It’s been fifteen years since the Second World War and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb crates have been filled, buildings reconstructed and the conflict is well and truly over. Alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel lives her life as it should be: led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel’s doorstep, as a guest – there to stay for the season…

Eva is Isabel’s antithesis: she sleeps late, wakes late, walks loudly through the house and touches things she shouldn’t. In response, Isabel develops a fury-fuelled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house – a spoon, a knife, a bowl – Isabel’s suspicions spiral out of control. In the sweltering heat of summer, Isabel’s paranoia gives way to desire, leading to a discovery that unravels all she has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva nor the house are what they seem.

Title: Stone Yard Devotional
Author: Charlotte Wood
Publisher: Sceptre
Publishing Date: 2023
No. of Pages: 293

Synopsis: 

Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of the Australian outback.

She doesn’t believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident.

But disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signalling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who disappeared decades before, presumed murdered. And finally, a troubling visitor plunges the narrator further back into her past…

Title: Held
Author: Anne Michaels
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Publishing Date: 2023
No. of Pages: 220

Synopsis:

1917. On a battlefield near the River Escaut, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory as the snow falls – a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night.

1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near a different river. He is alive but still not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and tries to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures: ghosts with messages he cannot understand.

So begins a narrative that spans four generations of connections and consequences that ignite and reignite as the century unfolds. In radiant moments of desire, comprehension, longing, and transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later.

Held is affecting and intensely beautiful, full of mystery, wisdom, and compassion, a novel by a writer at the height of her powers.

Title: Creation Lake
Author: Rachel Kushner
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
Publishing Date: 2024
No. of Pages: 404

Synopsis: 

Sadie Smith – a thirty-four-year-old American undercover agent of ruthless tactics and bold opinions – is sent by her mysterious but powerful employers to a remote corner of France. Her mission: to infiltrate a commune of radical eco-activists influenced by the beliefs of an enigmatic elder, Bruno Lacombe, who has rejected civilisation, lives in a Neanderthal cave, and believes the path to enlightenment is a return to primitivism.

Sadie casts her cynical eye over this region of ancient farms and sleepy villages, and finds Buno’s idealism laughable, but just as she is certain she’s the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Bruno Lacombe is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story.

Beneath this taut, dazzling story about a woman caught in the crossfire between the past and the future lies a profound treatise on human history. Creation Lake is Rachel Kushner’s finest novel yet – a work of high art, high comedy and irresistible pleasure.

Title: Orbital
Author: Samantha Harvey
Publisher: Grove Press
Publishing Date: 2023
No. of Pages: 207

Synopsis:

A slender novel of epic power, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men hurtling through space – not towards the moon or the vast unknown, but around our planet. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts – from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan – have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate. So are the marks of civilization far below, encrusted on the planet on which we live.

Profound, contemplative, and gorgeous, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and a moving elegy to our humanity, environment, and planet.