It’s the second day of the week! It’s also time for a Top 5 Tuesday update. Top 5 Tuesdays was initially created by Shanah @ the Bionic Bookworm but is now currently being hosted by Meeghan @ Meeghan Reads.

This week’s topic: Top 5 authors I want to try in 2025

There are so many good books and good writers out there. I want to foray into their oeuvres to explore new worlds. Here are some of the writers whose bodies of work I have yet to explore and am raring to.

Title: The Silent Angel
Author: Heinrich Böll
Translator (from German): Breon Mitchell
Publisher: Picador
Publishing Date: August 1995 (1992)
No. of Pages: 182

Synopsis: 

Rejected by German publishers in 1950, this recently discovered first novel by Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Böll is a treasure for scholars, students, and contemporary readers.

Just days after the end of World War II, German soldier Hans Schnitzler returns to a bombed German city, carrying a dead comrade’s coat to his widow – not knowing that the coat contains a will. Soon Hans is caught in a dangerous intrigue involving the will; he also begins a tentative romance with another grieving woman, as together they seek an identity and a future together in the ruined city.

Raw and masterful, The Silent Angel summons the full horror of war, while affirming the human heart’s enduring strength.

Title: Wolf Hall
Author: Hilary Mantel
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Publishing Date: 2009
No. of Pages: 650

Synopsis: 

England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe oppose him. The quest for the petulant king’s freedom destroys his advisor, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum and a deadlock.

Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a bully and a charmer, Cromwell has broken all the rules of a rigid society in his rise to power, and is prepared to break some more. Rising from the ashes of personal disaster – the loss of his young family and of Wolsey, his beloved patron – he picks his way deftly through a court where ‘man is wolf to man.’ Pitting himself against parliament, the political establishment and the papacy, he is prepared to reshape England to his own and Henry’s desires.

From one of our finest living writers, Wolf Hall is that very rare thing: a truly great English novel, one that explores the intersection of individual psychology and wider politics. With a vast array of characters, and richly overflowing with incident, it peels back history to show us Tudor England as a half-made society, moulding itself with great passion and suffering and courage.

Title: Mild Vertigo
Author: Mieko Kanai
Translator (from Japanese): Polly Barton
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Publishing Date: 2023 (1997)
No. of Pages: 169

Synopsis: 

Housewife Natsumi leads a small, unremarkable life in a modern Tokyo apartment with her husband and two sons: she does the laundry, goes on tris to the supermarket, visits friends and gossips with neighbours. Tracing her conversations and interactions with her family and friends as they blend seamlessly into her own internally buzzing internal monologue, Mild Vertigo explores the dizzying reality of being unable to locate oneself in the endless stream of minutiae that forms a lonely life confined to a middle-class home, where both everything and nothing happens. With shades of Clarice Lispector, Elena Ferrante and Lucy Ellman, this verbally acrobatic novel by the esteemed novelist, essayist and critic Mieko Kanai – whose work enjoys a cult status in Japan – is a disconcerting and radically imaginative portrait of selfhood in late-stage capitalist society.

Title: Slaughterhouse-Five
Author: Kurt Vonnegut
Publisher: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence
Publishing Date: March 1994
No. of Pages: 205

Synopsis: 

A fourth-generation German-American now living in easy circumstances on Cape Cod (and smoking too much), who, as an American infantry scout hors de combat, as a prisoner of war, witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, “the Florence of the Elbe,” a long time ago, and survived to tell the tale. This is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the Planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from. Peace.

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.