This is the second part of my January 2025 book haul. The first part features works of Japanese writers in line with my current literary journey; I am reading works of East Asian writers. The second part features the works of writers. Interestingly, only two books were originally written in English. The rest were originally written in other languages. Without ado, here is the second part of my January book haul.

Title: There Are Rivers in the Sky
Author: Elif Shafak
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Publishing Date: 2024
No. of Pages: 433

Synopsis:

This is the story of one lost poem, two great rivers and three remarkable lives – all connected by a single drop of water.

In the ruins of Nineveh, that ancient city of Mesopotamia, hidden in the sand, lie the fragments of a long-forgotten poem: the Epic of Gilgamesh.

In Victorian London, an extraordinary child is born at the edge of the dirt-black Thames. Arthur’s only chance of escaping poverty is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a printing press, Arthur’s world opens up far beyond the slums, with one book soon sending him across the seas: Nineveh and Its Remains.

In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a Yazidi girl living by the River Tigris, waits to be baptized with water brought from the holy city of Lalish in Iraq. The ceremony is cruelly interrupted, and soon Narin and her grandmother must journey across war-torn lands in the hope of reaching the sacred valley of their people.

In 2018 London, brokenhearted Zaleekhah moves to a houseboat on the Thames to escape the wreckage of her marriage. Zaleekhah foresees a life drained of all love and meaning – until an unexpected connection to her homeland changes everything.

A dazzling feat of storytelling from one of the greatest writers of our time, Elif Shafak’s There Are Rivers in the Sky is a rich, sweeping novel that spans centuries, continents and cultures, entwined by rivers, rains and waterdrops. It asks who gets to control memory. And it tells a powerful story about the cost of forgetting.

Title: The Glass Room
Author: Simon Mawer
Publisher: Little, Brown
Publishing Date: 2009
No. of Pages: 404

Synopsis: 

On honeymoon in Venice in 1929, Viktor and Liesel Landauer face a new world where they meet brilliant architect Rainer von Abt. Soon, on a hillside near a provincial Czech town, the Landauer House with its celebrated Glass Room will become von Abt’s greatest work, a modernist masterpiece in glass ad steel, with travertine floors and onyx walls, filled with light and optimism. ut while Viktor’s beautiful wife is Aryan, he is Jewish, and so when Nazi troops arrive the family must flee.

Yet their exile is not the end of the spectacular building. It slips form hand to hand, from Czech to Nazi to Soviet and finally to the Czechoslovak state, the crystalline perfection of the Glass Room always exerting a gravitational pull on those who know it. It becomes a laboratory, a shelter from the storm of war, and a place where the broken and the ruined find some kind of comfort until, with the collapse of Communism, the Landauers can finally return to where their story began.

Simon Mawer’s virtuoso The Glass Room is resounding evidence of a novelist working at the peak of his powers.

Title: A Heart So White
Author: Javier Marías
Translator (from Spanish): Philip Gabriel
Publisher: Margaret Jull Costa
Publishing Date: 2012 (1995)
No. of Pages: 279

Synopsis:

Juan knows almost nothing of his father Ranz’s interior life. But when Juan marries, he’s compelled to consider the past anew and to ponder what he doesn’t really want to know. As family secrets – their possible convenience, their ultimate price, and even their possible civility – hover, A Heart So White becomes a sort of anti-detective story of human nature. Intrigue; the sins of the father; the fraudulent and the genuine; marriage and strange repetitions of violence; Marías elegantly sends shafts of inquisitor light into shadows and onto the costs of ambivalence as it chronicles the relentless power of the past.

Title: The Skating Rink
Author: Roberto Bolaño
Translator (from Spanish): Chris Andrews
Publisher: New Directions
Publishing Date: 2009 (1993)
No. of Pages: 182

Synopsis: 

Rife with political corruption, sex, jealousy and frustrated passion, The Skating Rink is a darkly atmospheric chronicle of one summer season in a seaside town on the Costa Brava, north of Barcelona.

The story revolves around the beautiful figure-skating champion Nuria Marti. When she is suddenly dropped from the Olympic team, a besotted admirer builds a secret ice rink for her in the ruins of an old mansion outside of town. What he doesn’t tell her is that he paid for it using embezzled public funds, but such a betrayal is only the beginning, and the skating rink soon becomes a crime scene.

Told in short, suspenseful chapters by three alternating male narrators – a corrupt and pompous civil servant, a beleaguered yet still romantic itinerant poet, and a duplicitous local entrepreneur – The Skating Rink is a wholly engrossing tale of murder and its motives.

Title: Pain
Author: Zeruya Shalev
Translator (from Hebrew): Sondra Silverston
Publisher: Other Press
Publishing Date: 2019 (2015)
No. of Pages: 356

Synopsis:

Ten years after she was seriously injured in a terrorist attack, pain comes back to torment Iris. But that is not all: this mysterious pain brings Eitan, the love of her youth, back into her life. Though their relationship ended many years ago, she was more deeply wounded by his departure than by the suicide bomber who blew himself up next to her.

Iris’s marriage is stagnant. Her two children have grown up and are almost independent; she herself has become a dedicated, successful school principal. Now, after years without passion and joy, Eitan brings them back into her life. But she must concoct all sorts of lies to conceal her affair from her family, and the lies become more and more complicated.

Is this an impossible predicament, or on the contrary a scintillating revelation of the many ways life’s twists and turns can bring us to a place we would never have expected to be?

Title: This Little Family
Author: Inès Bayard
Translator (from French): Adriana Hunter
Publisher: Other Press
Publishing Date: 2020 (2018)
No. of Pages: 264

Synopsis:

Marie and Laurent, a young, affluent couple, have settled into their large Paris apartment and decide to start trying for a baby. This picture-perfect existence is shattered when Marie is assaulted by her new boss. Deeply shaken by the attack, she discovers she is pregnant, and is convinced her rapist is the father. Marie closes herself off in a destructive silence, ultimately leading her to commit an irreparable act.

In a first novel of extraordinary power and depth, Inès Bayard tears down the hypocritical facade of upper-middle-class respectability, exposing disturbing truths about how society sees women, and how women see themselves.

Title: Straight from the Horse’s Mouth
Author: Meryem Alaoui
Translator (from French): Emma Ramadan
Publisher: Other Press
Publishing Date: 2020 (2018)
No. of Pages: 281

Synopsis:

Thirty-four-year-old prostitute Jmiaa reflects on the bustling world around her with a brutal honesty, but also a quick wit that cuts through the drudgery. Like many of the women in her working-class Casablanca neighborhood, Jmiaa struggles to earn enough money to support herself and her family – often including the deadbeat husband who walked out on her and their young daughter. While she doesn’t despair about her profession like her roommate, Halima, who reads the Quran between clients, she still has to maintain a delicate balance between her reality and the “respectable” one she paints for her own more conservative mother.

This daily grind is interrupted by the arrival of an aspiring young director, Chadlia, whom Jmiaa takes to calling “Horse Mouth.” Chadlia enlists Jmiaa’s help on a film project, initially just to make sure the plot and dialogue are authentic. But when she’s unable to find an actress who’s right for the starring role, she turns again to Jmiaa, giving the latter an incredible opportunity for a better life.

In her breakout debut novel, Meryem Alaoui creates a vibrant picture of the day-to-day challenges faced by working people in Casablanca, which they meet head-on with resourcefulness and resilience.