And that’s a wrap for 2024. Happy New Year everyone! I hope 2025 will be a great year for everyone. May it be a year brimming with positive changes, growth, development, life-changing lessons, and blessings.

But before I could wave 2024 goodbye, let me share the book titles I acquired in December. I divided my book haul into two parts. The first part featured books originally written in a language other than English. This part features books originally written in English. Without ado, here is the second part of my December book haul.

Title: The Curse of Pietro Houdini
Author: Derek B. Miller
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Publishing Date: January 2024
No. of Pages: 353

Synopsis:

August 1943. Fourteen-year-old Massimo is all alone. Newly orphaned and fleeing from Rome after surviving the American bombing raid that killed his parents, Massimo is attacked by thugs and finds himself bloodied at the base of Montecassino, the hilltop upon which a Benedictine abbey stands in all its imposing glory. It is there, in the abbey’s shadow, that a charismatic and eccentric man called Pietro Houdini, the self-proclaimed “master artist and confidant of the Vatican,” rescues Massimo and brings him up the mountain to serve as his assistant in preserving the treasures that lie within the monastery walls.

But can Massimo believe what Pietro is saying, particularly when Massimo has secrets too? Who is this extraordinary man? When it becomes evident that Montecassino will soon be the front line in the war, Pietro and Massimo set out to smuggle three priceless Titiann paintings to safety down the mountain. They are joined by a nurse concealing a nefarious past, a cafe owner turned murderer, a wounded but chipper German soldier, and a pair of lovers along with their injured mule, Ferrari. Together they will lie, cheat, steal, fight, kill, and sin their way through battlefields to survive, all while smuggling the Renaissance masterpieces and the bag full of ancient Greek gold they have rescued from the “safekeeping” of the Germans.

Heartfelt, fast-paced, and profoundly moving, The Curse of Pietro Houdini is a work of storytelling bravado: a thrilling action-packed adventure heist, an imaginative chronicle of forgotten history, and a philosophical coming-of-age in which a child navigates one of the most enigmatic and morally complex fronts of World War II and lives to tell the tale.

Title: Playground
Author: Richard Powers
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company
Publishing Date: 2024
No. of Pages: 381

Synopsis: 

Four lives are drawn together in a sweeping, panoramic new novel from Richard Powers, showcasing the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.

They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorous once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity’s next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island’s residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away.

Set in the world’s largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.

Title: The Volcano Daughters
Author: Gina Maria Balibreara
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Publishing Date: 2024
No. of Pages: 350

Synopsis:

A searingly original debut about two sisters and their flight from genocide – which takes them from Hollywood, to Paris, to San Francisco’s Cannery Row – each haunted along the way by the ghosts of their murdered friends, who are not yet done telling their stories.

El Salvador, 1923. Graciela, a young girl growing up on a volcano in a community of Indigenous women, is summoned to the capital, where she is claimed as an oracle for a rising dictator. There she meets Consuelo, the sister she has never known, who was stolen from their home before Graciela was born. The two spend years under the cruel El Gran Pendejo’s regime, unwillingly helping his reign of terror, until genocide strikes the community from which they hail. Each believing the other to be dead, they escape, fleeing across the globe, reinventing themselves until fate ultimately brings them back together in the most unlikely of ways.

Endlessly surprising, vividly imaginative, and bursting with lush life, The Volcano Daughters charts a new history and mythology of El Salvador, fiercely bringing forth voices that have been calling out for generations,

Title: The Thursday Murder Club
Author: Richard Osman
Publisher: Viking
Publishing Date: 2020
No. of Pages: 377

Synopsis: 

In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet up once a week to investigate unsolved murders.

But when a brutal killing takes place on their very doorstep, the Thursday Murder Club find themselves in the middle of their first live case.

Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron might be pushing eighty but they still have a few tricks up their sleeves.

Can our unorthodox but brilliant gang catch the killer before it’s too late?

Title: Leaving the World Behind
Author: Rumaan Alam
Publisher: Ecco
Publishing Date: 2020
No. of Pages: 241

Synopsis:

Amanda and Clay head out to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a vacation: a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter, and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they’ve rented for the week. But with a late-night knock on the door, the spell is broken. Ruth and G.H., an older couple who claim to own the home, have arrived there in a panic. These strangers say that a sudden blackout has swept New York, and – with nowhere else to turn – they’ve come to the country in search of shelter.

But with the TV and internet down, and no cell phone service, the facts are unknowable. Should Amanda and Clay trust this intruding couple – and vice verse? What has happened back in New York? Is the vacation home, isolated from civilization, truly a safe place for their families? And are they safe from one another?

Suspenseful and provocative, Rumaan Alam’s third novel is keenly attuned to the complexities of parenthood, race, and class. Leave the World Behind explores how our closest bonds are reshaped – and unexpected new ones forged – in moments of crisis.

Title: Telegraph Avenue
Author: Michael Chabon
Publisher: Harper
Publishing Date: 2012
No. of Pages: 465

Synopsis:

As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there – longtime friends, bandmates, and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkely Birth Partners, two semi-legendary midwives who have welcomed more than a thousand newly minted citizens into the dented utopia at whose heart – half tavern, half temple -stands Brokeland.

When ex-NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fifth-richest black man in America, announces plans to build his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby stretch of Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear it means certain dooom for their vulnerable little enterprise. Meanwhile, Aviva and Gwen also find themselves caught up in a battle for their professional existence, one that tests the limits of their friendship. Adding another layer of complication to the couples’ already tangled lives is the surprise of Titus Joyner, the teenage son Archy has never acknowledged and the love of fifteen-year-old Julius Jaffe’s life.

An intimate epic, a NorCal Middlemarch set to the funky beat of classic vinyl soul-jazz and pulsing with a virtuosic, pyrotechnical style all its own, Telegraph Avenue is the great American novel we’ve been waiting for. Generous, imaginative, funny, moving, thrilling, humane, triumphant, it is Michael Chabon’s most dazzling book yet.

Title: The Book of Illusions
Author: Paul Auster
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
Publishing Date: 2002
No. of Pages: 321

Synopsis:

Six months after losing his wife and two young sons in an airplane crash, Vermont professor David Zimmer spends his waking hours in a blur of alcoholic grief and self-pity. Then, watching television one night, he stumbles upon a clip from a list film by the silent comedian Hector Mann, Zimmer’s interest is piqued, and he soon finds himself embarking on a journey around the world to study the works of this mysterious figure, who vanished from sight in 1929.

Who was Hector Mann? An Argentinian-born comic genius, with a signature white suit and fluttering black mustache, a master of “backpedals ad dodges. . . sudden torques and lunging pavanes. . . double takes and hop-steps and rhumba swivels.” Presumed dead for sixty years, he had flashed briefly across American movie screens, tantalizing the public with the promise of a brilliant future, and then, just as the silent era came to an end, he walked out of his house one January morning and was never heard from again.

Zimmer’s research leads him to write the first full-length study of Hector’s films. When the book is published the following year, a letter turns up in Zimmer’s mailbox bearing a return address from a small town in New Mexico – supposedly written by Hector’s wife. “Hector has read your book and would like to meet you. Are you interested in paying us a visit?” Is the letter a hoax, or is Hector Mann still alive? Torn between doubt and belief, Zimmer hesitates, until one night a strange woman appears on his doorstep and makes the decision for him, changing his life forever.

Written with breathtaking urgency and precision, this stunning novel plunges the reader into a universe in which the comic and the tragic, the real and the imagined, the violent and the tender dissolve into one another. With The Book of Illusion, one of America’s most powerful and original writers has written his richest, most emotionally charged work yet.

Title: The Echo Maker
Author: Richard Powers
Publisher: Vintage Books
Publishing Date: 2007 (2006)
No. of Pages: 569

Synopsis:

On a winter night on a remote road in Nebraska, Mark Schluter’s truck turns over in a near-fatal accident. His sister, Karin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to look after him. But when he finally awakes from his coma, Mark believes that Karin – who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister – is really an identical impostor.

Shattered by her brother’s refusal to recognise her, Karin contacts Dr Gerald Weber, famous for his case studies describing the infinitely bizarre worlds of brain disorder. But what Weber discovers in Mark begins to undermine even his own sense of self.

Meanwhile, Mark, armed only with a note left by an anonymous witness, attempts to learn what happened on the night of his accident. The truth of that evening will change the lives of all three beyond recognition.

Title: Love
Author: Toni Morrison
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Publishing Date: 2003
No. of Pages: 202

Synopsis:

May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida – even L: all women obsessed with Bill Cosey. The wealthy owner of the famous Cosey’s Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for father, husband, lover, guardian, and friend, yearnings that dominate the lives of these women long after his death. Yet while he is either the void in, or the center of, their stories, he himself is driven by secret forces – a troubled past and a spellbinding woman named Celestial.

This audacious exploration into the nature of love – its appetite, its sublime possession, its dread – is rich in characters, striking scenes, and a profound understanding of how alive the past can be.

A major addition to the canon of one of the world’s literary masters.

Title: Blindness
Author: Henry Green
Publisher: New York Review Books
Publishing Date: 2017 (1926)
No. of Pages: 201

Synopsis:

Blindness – Henry Green’s first novel, begun while he was still at Eton and finished before he left university – is the story of John Haye, a young student with literary airs. It starts with an excerpt from his diary, brimming with excitement and affectation and curiosity about life and literature. Then a freak accident robs John of his sight, plunging him into despair. Forced to live with his high-handed, horsey stepmother in the country, John begins a weird dalliance with a girl named Joan, leading to a new determination. Blindness is the curse of youth and inexperience and love and ambition, but blindness, John will discover, can also be the source of vision.

Title: Wish Her Safe At Home
Author: Stephen Benatar
Publisher: New York Review Books
Publishing Date: 2007 (1982)
No. of Pages: 263

Synopsis:

Rachel Waring is deliriously happy. Out of nowhere, a great-aunt leaves her a Georgian mansion in another city – and she sheds her old life without delay. Gone is her dull administrative job, her mousy wardrobe, her downer of a roommate. She will live as a woman of leisure, devoted to beauty, creativity, expression, and love. Once installed in her new quarters, Rachel plants a garden, takes up writing, and impresses everyone she meets with her extraordinary optimism. But as Rachel sings and jokes the days away, her new neighbors begn to wonder if she might be taking her transformation just a bit too far.

In Wish Her Safe at Home, Stephen Benatar finds humor and horror in the shifting region between elation and mania. His heroine could be the next-door neighbor of the Beales of Grey Gardens or a sister to Jane Gardam’s oddball protagonists, but she has an ebullient charm all her own.