Just like that, we are done with eleven months into 2024. We are waving goodbye to November and personally, what a final wave it was in the last week; I was swamped with work, more than I expected. Nevertheless, 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. 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 November goodbye, let me share the book titles I acquired during the month. I will be dividing my book haul into two parts. The second part features all other books that did not fall within the ambit of East Asian writers; they were featured in the first part. Without ado, here is the second part of my November book haul.

Title: Blindness
Author: José Saramago
Translator (from Portuguese): Giovanni Pontiero
Publisher: Mariner Books
Publishing Date: 1999 (1995)
No. of Pages: 326

Synopsis:

A city is hit by an epidemic of “white blindness” which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and assaulting women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers – among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears – through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century, Blindness is a powerful portrayal of man’s worst appetites and weaknesses – and man’s ultimately exhilarating spirit.

Title: Until August
Author: Gabriel García Márquez
Translator (from Spanish): Anne McLean
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Publishing Date: 2024
No. of Pages: 110

Synopsis: 

Sitting alone beside the languorous blue waters of the lagoon, Ana Magdalena Bach contemplates the men at the hotel bar. She has been happily married for twenty-seven years and has no reason to escape the life she has made with her husband and children. And yet, every August, she travels by ferry here to the island where her mother is buried, and for one night takes a new lover.

Across sultry Caribbean evenings full of salsa and boleros, lotharios and con men, Ana journeys further each year into the hinterland of her desire and the fear hidden in her heart.

Constantly surprising, joyously sensual, Until August is a profound meditation o freedom, regret, self-transformation, and the mysteries of love – an unexpected gift from one of the greatest writers the world has ever known.

Title: God Dies by the Nile
Author: Nawal El Saadawi
Translator (from Arabic): Sherif Hetata
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
Publishing Date: 1990 (1974)
No. of Pages: 136

Synopsis:

Zakeya hoes the stony fields on the banks of the Nile, each day as relentless and unchanging as the last. But when her two pretty young nieces fall prey to the lust of the local Mayor, a crude and petty tyrant, his cheating schemes provoke Zakeya into a startling act of revenge.

Written with all the sustained, brutal insistence of Woman at Point Zero, this tale of tragedy, deception and lust is also a moving political allegory.

Title: Weddings and Wakes
Author: Alice McDermott
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publishing Date: 2009 (1992)
No. of Pages: 207

Synopsis: 

Lucy Dailey leaves suburbia twice a week with her three children in tow, returning to the Brooklyn home where she grew up, and where her stepmother and unmarried sisters still live. The children quietly observe Aunt Veronica, who drowns her sorrows in drink, Aung Agnes, a caustic career woman, and finally Aunt May, the ex-nun, blossoming with a late and unexpected love, dutifully absorbing the legacy of their less-than-perfect family. Alice McDermott beautifully evokes three generations of an Irish-American family in this “haunting and masterly work of literary art” (The Wall Street Journal).

Title: God Bless You Mr. Rosewater
Author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Publisher: Vintage
Publishing Date: 1992 (1965)
No. of Pages: 167

Synopsis:

God Bless You, Mr Rosewater is a novel about people – their pleasures, pains and perversions – and money. It is a penetrating satire on insanity – a millionaire’s private lunacy, the inherited obsessions of a famous family and the collective madness that grips a whole nation.

Title: The Public Image
Author: Muriel Spark
Publisher: New Directions
Publishing Date: 1993 (1968)
No. of Pages: 144

Synopsis:

“All homage to Muriel Spark, the coolest writer ever to scald your liver and your lights” (The Washington Post). The Public Image, which the author has called “an ethical shocker,” provides a scalding the reader is unlikely to forget, particularly as it is so enjoyable.

Spark chooses Rome, “the motherland of sensation,” for the setting of her story about movie star Annabel Christopher (known to her adoring fans as “The English Lady-Tiger”), who has made the fatal mistake of believing in her public image. This error and her embittered husband, an unsuccessful actor, catch up with her. His final act is only the first shocking climax – further surprises await. Neatly savaging our celebrity culture, Spark rejoices in one of her favorite subjects – the clash between sham and genuine identity – and provides Annabel with an unexpected triumph. The Public Image is a wickedly funny and beautiful masterwork by a writer who is herself the crème de la crème.

Title: The Memory Painter
Author: Gwendolyn Womack
Publisher: Picador
Publishing Date: 2015
No. of Pages: 317

Synopsis:

What if there was a drug that could help you remember your past lives?

What if the lives you remembered could lead you to your one true love?

What if you learned that, for thousands of years, a deadly enemy had conspired to keep the two of you apart?

Title: Idu
Author: Flora Nwapa
Publisher: Heinemann International
Publishing Date: 1989 (1970)
No. of Pages: 218

Synopsis:

‘What we are all praying for is children. What else do we want if we have children?’ These two sentences from Idu contain the basic theme of the book, a novel set in a small Nigerian town where the life of the individual is woven into that of the community as a whole. For long it appears as though Idu is unable to have a child, and her husband Adiewere even takes a second wife. But finally Idu gives birth to a fine boy, Ijoma. But it is not until Ijoma is four years old that Idu becomes pregnant for a second time. Before her second child arrives, however, Adiewere mysteriously dies. Idu flouts all conventions by refusing to marry her husband’s brother, preferring to follow her husband to the next world. Clearly, children are not the only thing she wants from life.