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. This part features all other book purchases that are not shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize. Without ado, here is the second part of my October book haul.

Title: Martyr!
Author: Kaveh Akbar
Publisher: Knopf
Publishing Date: 2024
No. of Pages: 332

Synopsis:

Ever since his mother’s plane was senselessly shot down over the Persian Gulf when he was just a baby, Cyrus has been grappling with her death. Now, newly sober, he is set to learn the truth of her life.

When an encounter with a dying artist leads Cyrus towards the mysteries of his past – an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as an angel of death, a haunting work of art by an exited painter – he finds himself once again caught up in the story of his mother, who may not have been who or what she seemed. As Cyrus searches for meaning in the scattered clues of his life, a final revelation transforms everything he thought he knew.

Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

Title: Intermezzo
Author: Sally Rooney
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publishing Date: 2024
No. of Pages: 448

Synopsis: 

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationship with two very different women – his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude – a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

Title: Undiscovered
Author: Gabriela Wiener
Translator (from Spanish): Julia Sanches
Publisher: HarperVia
Publishing Date: 2023 (2022)
No. of Pages: 183

Synopsis:

Alone in a museum in Paris, Gabriela Wiener confronts her complicated family heritage. She is visiting an exhibition of pre-Columbian artifacts, spoils of European colonialism, many stolen from her homeland of Peru. As she peers at countless sculptures of Indigenous faces, each resembling her own, she sees herself in them – but the man responsible for pillaging them was her own great-great-grandfather, Austrian colonial explorer Charles Wiener.

In the wake of her father’s death, Gabriela returns to Peru. In alternating strands, she begins to probe her father’s infidelity, her own polyamorous relationship, and the history of her colonial ancestor, unpacking the legacy that is her birthright. From the eyepatched persona her father adopted to carry out his double life to the brutal racism she encounters in her ancestor Charles’s book, she traces a cycle of abandonment, jealousy, and fraud, in turn of reframing her own personal struggles with desire, love, and race.

Probing wounds both personal and historical, Wiener’s provocative novel embarks the reader on a quest to pick up the pieces of something shattered long ago in the hope of making it whole once again.

Title: Forgiving Imelda Marcos
Author: Nathan Go
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publishing Date: 2023
No. of Pages: 226

Synopsis: 

After suffering a serious heart injury, Lito Macaraeg reaches out to his estranged son – a journalist who lives in the United States, far from Lito’s Manila nursing home – to promise him a scoop: the story of a secret meeting between Imelda Marcos and Corazon Aquino years before. Imelda, best known for her excessive shoe collection, was the flamboyant wife of the late Philippine dictator; Corazon was the wife of the opposition politician who was allegedly killed by the Marcoses. An unassuming housewife, Corazon rose up after her husband’s death to lead the massive rallies that eventually toppled the Marcos dictatorship.

Lito was Corazon’s personal driver for many years, and her only companion on the journey form Manila to Baguio City to meet Imelda. Throughout the long drive, Lito’s loyalty to his employer is pitted against his own moral uncertainty about Corazon’s desire to forgive Imelda. But as Lito tells his son the tale of these two women, his own story and his own failings slowly come to light. He delves into his past: his neglectful father, who joined a Communist guerrilla movement; their life in a mountain encampment headed by a charismatic priest; and his struggles with poverty and ambition. In the end, Lito is left to contemplate the meaning and possibility of forgiveness.

In Forgiving Imelda Marcos, Nathan Go weaves a deeply intimate alternative history that explores power and powerlessness, the nature of guilt, and what we owe to those we love.

Title: A Small Place
Author: Jamaica Kincaid
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publishing Date: 2000 (1988)
No. of Pages: 81

Synopsis:

Lyrical, sardonic, and forthright, A Small Place magnifies our vision of one small place with Swiftian wit and precision. Jamaica Kincaid’s expansive essay candidly appraises the ten-by-twelve mile island in the British West Indies where she grew up, and makes palpable the impact of European colonization and tourism. The book is a missive to the traveler, whether American or European, who wants to escape the banality and corruption of some large place. Kincaid, eloquent and resolute, reminds us that the Antiguan people, formerly British subjects, are unable to escape the same drawbacks of their own tiny realm – that behind the benevolent Caribbean scenery are human lives, always complex and often fraught with injustice.

Title: Omeros
Author: Sir Derek Walcott
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publishing Date: 1996 (1990)
No. of Pages: 325

Synopsis: 

A poem in five books, of circular narrative design, titled with the Greek name for Homer, which simultaneously charts two currents of history: the visible history charted in events—the tribal losses of the American Indian, the tragedy of African enslavement—and the interior, unwritten epic fashioned from the suffering of the individual in exile. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: Marcovaldo (or The seasons in the city)
Author: Italo Calvino
Translator (from Italian): William Weaver
Publisher: Harcourt Brace
Publishing Date: 1983 (1963)
No. of Pages: 121

Synopsis:

An unskilled worker in a drab northern Italian industrial city of the 1950s and 1960s, Marcovaldo has a practiced eye for spotting natural beauty and an unquenchable longing to come a little closer to the unspoiled world of his imagining. Much to the puzzlement of his wife, his children, his boss, and his neighbors, he chases his dreams, gives rein to his fantasies, tries – with more ingenuousness than skill – to lessen his burden and that of those around him. The results are never the anticipated ones.