And just like that, we wrapped up the second month of 2025. How is the year so far? I hope it is brimming with positive changes, growth, development, life-changing lessons, and blessings. Otherwise, I hope the coming months will usher in positive changes and a reversal of fortune. I hope 2025 will go everyone’s way and everyone’s wishes and prayers will be answered. But before I could wave goodbye to the love month, let me share the book titles I acquired during the month. I will be dividing my book haul into two parts. Because the first quarter of the year is dedicated to works of East Asian literature, the first part of this book haul update featured works of Japanese writers. The second part features other books. Without ado, here is the second part of my February book haul.

Title: Deplorable Conversations With Cats and Other Distractions
Author: Yeoh Jo-Ann
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 2024
No. of Pages: 383

Synopsis:

Lucky Lee has everything – wealth, charm, money, good looks – and does very, very little with it. He’s content. He’s happy. He takes for granted that life is good and always will be. But then his sister, the go-getting, successful, famous TV chef Pearl Lee, dies, horribly and suddenly. Lucky is devastated. As he struggles to live without the big sister who’s always been the dominant, often relentless force in his life, the inconceivable happens – her cat begins to talk to him. It wants to know where Pearl is. It questions his eating habits, his outfit choices, his life. It hogs the TV. It tells him stories. Now grief-stricken Lucky has a major problem: he may very well be mad.

Title: In The Country of Men
Author: Hisham Matar
Publisher: Viking
Publishing Date: 2006
No. of Pages: 245

Synopsis: 

On a white-hot day in Tripoli, Libya, in the summer of 1979, nine-year-old Suleiman is shopping in the market square with his mother. His father is away on business – but Suleiman is sure he has just seen him, standing across the street in a pair of dark glasses. But why isn’t he waving? And why doesn’t he come over when he knows Suleiman’s mother is falling apart?

Whispers and fears intensify around Suleiman: his best friend’s father disappears and is next seen being interrogated on state television; a man parks his car outside the house every day and asks strange questions: and his mother frantically burns his father’s books. As Suleiman begins to wonder whether his father has disappeared for good, it feels as if the walls of his home will break with the secrets that are being held within.

In deceptively simple prose Hisham Matar has written a novel of devastating power. A deeply affecting story of love and betrayal, In the Country of Men goes to the very heart of the cruelties and frailties of human experience.

Title: The Sweetest Fruits
Author: Monique Truong
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 2020 (2019)
No. of Pages: 290

Synopsis:

In The Sweetest Fruits, three women – Greek, African American, and Japanese – tell the story of their time with Lafcadio Hearn, a globe-trotting writer best known for his books about Japan. In their own unorthodox ways, these women are also intrepid travelers and explorers. Their accounts witness Hearn’s remarkable life but also seek to witness their own existence and luminous will to live unbounded by gender, race, and the mores of their time. Each is a gifted storyteller with her own precise reason for sharing her story.

With brilliant sensitivity and an unstinting eye, Monique Truong illuminates the women’s tenacity and their struggles in a novel that circumnavigates the globe in the search for love, family, home, and belonging.

Title: His Native Coast
Author: Edith L. Tiempo
Publisher: Univesity of the Philippines Press
Publishing Date: 2000 (1979)
No. of Pages: 235

Synopsis: 

His Native Coast is a story of a search for identity. The rather inarticulate attempt of Michale Linder to shape for himself a personal identification with the world that would give ultimate meaning to his life is paralleled by Marina’s own search: for Marina is partly tribal, and although her life and training are steeped in Western (American) culture, she is haunted by the influence of her Ifugao mother, who had lived and died in her native hills without once coming down to the lowlands.

His Native Coast gives the reader a provocative and moving story of two “pilgrimages,” one ending outside of the seeker’s geographical context, and the other in a return to it: one resulting in a glimpse of self-recognition, the other in what turns out to be a refusal of it.

The novel attempts a definition of personal and national identity that transcends geographical origins, and suggests that whether one is in his home country or not, the belief in his own human usefulness in his context has much to do with forging a healthy sense of belonging.

In these days of heightened self-searching among the western-influenced-developing nations, this Philippine experience offers its own unique insight.

Title: The Attack
Author: Yasmina Khadra
Translator (from French): John Cullen
Publisher: Anchor Books
Publishing Date: May 2007 (2005)
No. of Pages: 257

Synopsis:

From the acclaimed author of The Swallows of Kabul comes this timely and haunting novel that powerfully illuminates the devastating human costs of terrorism. Dr. Amin Jaafari is an Arab-Israeli surgeon at a hospital in Tel Aviv. As an admired and respected member of his community, he has carved a space for himself and his wife, Sihem, at the crossroads of two troubled societies. Jaafari’s world is abruptly shattered when Sihem is killed in a suicide bombing.

As evidence mounts that Sihem could have been responsible for the catastrophic bombing, Jaafari begins a tortured search for answers. Faced with the ultimate betrayal, he must find a way to reconcile his cherished memories of his wife with the growing realization that she may have had another life, one that was entirely removed from the comfortable, modern existence that they shared.

Title: The Misunderstanding
Author: Irène Némirovsky
Translator (from French): Sandra Smith
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
Publishing Date: 2012 (1926)
No. of Pages: 160

Synopsis: 

Yves Harteloup, scarred by the war, is a disappointed young man, old money fallen on hard times, who returns for the summer to the rich, comfortable Atlantic resort of Hendaye, where he spent blissful childhood holidays. He becomes infatuated by a beautiful, bored young woman, Denise, whose rich husband is often away on business. Intoxicated by summer nights and Yves’ intensity, Denise falls passionately in love, before the idyll has to end and Yves must return to his mundane office job.

In the mournful Paris autumn their love founders on mutual misunderstanding, in the apparently unbridgeable gap between a life of idle wealth and the demands of making a living, between a woman’s needs and a man’s way of loving. As Denise is driven mad with desire and jealous suspicion, Yves, too sure of her, tortures himself and her with his emotional ambivalence. Taking her sophisticated mother’s advice, Denise takes action… which she may regret forever.

With a sharp satirical eye and a characteristic perception for the fault lines in human relationships, Irène Némirovsky’s first novel shows sure signs of the brilliant novelist she was to become.

Title: The Years
Author: Annie Ernaux
Translator (from French): Alison L. Strayer
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Publishing Date: 2017 (2008)
No. of Pages: 231

Synopsis:

The Years was a breakout bestseller when published in France in 2008, and is regarded as a contemporary classic in French studies departments in the US.

The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present – even projections into the future – photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands, and names for the ever-proliferating objects are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author’s continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective. On its 2008 publication in France, The Years came as a surprise. Though Ernaux had for years been hailed as a beloved, bestselling, and award-winning author, The Years was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir “written” by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the “I” for the “we” (or “they,” or “one”) as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents’ generation (and could be writing of her own book): “From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the ‘we’ and impersonal pronouns.”

Title: The Casualty
Author: Heinrich Böll
Translator (from German): Leila Vennewitz
Publisher: The Hogarth Press
Publishing Date: 1989 (1983)
No. of Pages: 189

Synopsis: 

In these powerful, moving stories, Heinrich Böll conveys the despair, hardship and disillusionment of ordinary Germans caught up in an absurd brutal war. The horrors war entails are unforgettably depicted, in terms of both human tragedy and spiritual degradation as Böll describes the struggle of the common man, trapped in muddy holes on the Russian front or amid the rubble of devastated cities, desperate to survive and to preserve his humanity.

Title: The Salt of the Earth
Author: Józef Wittlin
Translator (from Polish): Patrick John Corness
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Publishing Date: 2018 (1935, 1937)
No. of Pages: 345

Synopsis:

At the beginning of the twentieth century the villagers of the Carpathian mountains lead simple lives, much as they have always done. Among them is Piotr, a bandy-legged peasant, who wants nothing more from life than an official railway cap, a cottage, and a bride with a dowry.

But then the First World War reaches the mountains and Piotr is drafted into the army. All the weight of imperial authority is used to mould him into an unthinking fighting machine, forced to wage a war he does not understand, for interests other than his own.

The Salt of the Earth is a classic war novel and a powerfully pacifist story about the consequences of war for ordinary men.

Title: A Nest of the Gentry
Author: Ivan Turgenev
Translator (from Russian): Michael Pursglove
Publisher: Alma Classics
Publishing Date: 2016 (1859)
No. of Pages: 200

Synopsis: 

Coming back to the “nest” of his family home in Russia after years of fruitless endeavours away from his roots, Lavretsky decides to turn his back on the vacuous salons of Paris and his frivolous and unfaithful wife Varvara Pavlovna. On his return he meets Liza, the daughter of one of his cousins, whom he had known when they were children and who rekindles in him long-smothered feelings of love. news of Varvara’s death arrive from France, offering Lavretsky the prospect of a new life, but a cruel twist threatens to shatter his dreams and forces him to re-evaluate his plans.

Hailed as a masterpiece of Russian literature, A Nest of the Gentry, Turgenev’s most successful and widely read novel – here presented in a new translation by Michael Pursglove – deals with the personal struggles of the individual in a period of turbulent social change.

Title: Season of Migration to the North
Author: Tayeb Salih
Translator (from Arabic): Denys Johnson-Davies
Publisher: New York Review Books
Publishing Date: 2009 (1969)
No. of Pages: 139

Synopsis:

After years of study in Europe, the young narrator of Season of Migration to the North returns to his village along the Nile in the Sudan. It is the 1960s, and he is eager to make a contribution to the new postcolonial life of his country. Back home, he discovers a stranger among the familiar faces of childhood – the enigmatic Mustafa Sa’eed. Mustafa takes the young man into his confidence, telling him the story of his own years in London, of his brilliant career as an economist, and of the series of fraught and deadly relationships with European women that led to a terrible public reckoning and his return to his native land.

But what is the meaning of Mustafa’s shocking confession? Mustafa disappears without explanation, leaving the young man – whom he has asked to look after his wife – in an unsettled and violent no-man’s land between Europe and Africa, tradition and innovation, holiness and defilement, and man and woman, from which no one will escape unaltered or unharmed.

Season of Migration to the North is a rich and sensual work of deep honesty and incandescent lyricism. In 2001 it was selected by a panel of Arab writers and critics as the most important novel of the twentieth century.