And just like that, we wrapped up the third month of 2025. We are already a quarter down into 2025. How is the year so far? I hope it is brimming with positive changes, growth, development, life-changing lessons, and blessings. If it is going the other way, I hope the coming months will provide 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. Without ado, here are the books I obtained in March.

Title: The Ruined Map
Author: Kōbō Abe
Translator (From Japanese): E. Dale Saunders
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 2020 (1967)
No. of Pages: 233

Synopsis: 

A private detective is hired to find a missing person, but nothing is normal about this case. Why has the beautiful, alcoholic wife of a vanished salesman waited over half a year to search for him? Why are the only clues a photo and a matchbox? As the investigator’s ever-more puzzling hunt takes him into the labyrinthine depths of the urban underworld, he begins to wonder if it is in fact he who is lost. An intoxicating blend of noir thriller and surreal dream, The Ruined Map questions identity itself.

Title: Light and Darkness
Author: Natsume Sōseki
Translator (from Japanese): V.H. Viglielmo
Publisher: Picador
Publishing Date: 1985 (1916)
No. of Pages: 375

Synopsis: 

Light and Darkness is the last great work of Natsume Sōseki, recognized by Japanese and Western authorities as Jaoan’s foremost modern novelist. Although it remains unfinished because of his death it presents a study in depth of a young married couple, Tsuda and his wife O-Nobu, and the early twentieth-century Japanese world in which they live. Sōseki probes deep into his principal characters exposing layer after layer of egoism, and revealing the process whereby man cuts himself off from his fellow men and becomes incapable of love.

Title: The Captain’s Daughter
Author: Alexander Pushkin
Translator (from Russian): Anthony Briggs
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Publishing Date: 2021 (1836)
No. of Pages: 252

Synopsis: 

Pushkin’s restless and creative genius laid the foundations for Russian prose. His stories among the greatest and most influential ever written, retain stunning directness and precision, more than ever in Anthony Brigg’s finely nuanced translations.

Upending expectations at every turn, Pushkin depicts brutal conflicts and sudden reversals of fortune with disarming lightness and sly humor These are stories of fateful chances: a stationmaster encourages his young daughter to ride to town with a traveller, only to lose her forever; a man obsessively pursues an elderly woman’s secret for success at cards, with bizarre results, in ‘The Queen of Spades’; and in The Captain’s Daughter, Pushkin’s great historical novella of love and rebellion in the era of Catherine the Great, a mysterious encounter proves fatally significant during a violent uprising.

Title: An Evening With Claire
Author: Gaito Gazdanov
Translator (from Russian): Bryan Karetnyk
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Publishing Date: 2021 (1930)
No. of Pages: 219

Synopsis: 

Two old friends meet nightly in Paris, after a separation of ten years. Trading conversational barbs and manoeuvring around submerged feelings, Claire and Kolya resume what fate interrupted. When their long-imagined romance at last becomes reality, Kolya is engulfed by memories of Russia, from a tragic and solitary childhood to the disorienting ordeal of civil war. As his haunting recollection takes place, so too does a portrait f lost youth set against the trauma of a vanished homeland.

Written when Gadzanov was just twenty-six, An Evening with Claire is the celebrated Russian master’s debut novel, and appears here in an elegant new translation by Bryan Karetnyk. Melancholic and lyrical, it is a powerful distillation of the quintessential émigré experience: caught between two worlds, belonging to neither.

Title: The New Sorrows of Young W.
Author: Ulrich Pledzdorf
Translator (from German): Romy Fursland
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Publishing Date: 2015 (1972)
No. of Pages: 139

Synopsis: 

Edgar W., teenage dropout, unrequited lover, unrecognized genius – and dead – tells the story of his brief, spectacular life.

It is the story of how he rebels against the petty rules of communist East Germany to live in an abandoned summer house, with just a tape recorder and a battered copy of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther for company. Of his passionate love for the dark-eyed, unattainable kindergarten teacher Charlie. And of how, in a series of calamitous events (involving electricity and a spray paint machine), he meets his untimely end.

Absurd, funny and touching, this cult German bestseller, now in a new translation, is both a satire on life in the GDR and a hymn to youthful freedom.

Title: The Prisoner of Heaven
Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Translator (from Spanish): Lucia Graves
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Publishing Date: 2012 (2011)
No. of Pages: 278

Synopsis: 

Barcelona, 1957. It is the week before Christmas in the Sempere & Sons bookshop. Daniel Sempere has married the love of his life, Bea, and they have had a son whilst their partner in crime, Fermin, is busy preparing for his wedding to Bernarda in the New Year. Just when it seems as if luck is finally smiling on them, a mysterious figure with a pronounced limp enters the shop. He insists on buying the most expensive volume on display – a beautiful illustrated edition of The Count of Monte Cristo – and then proceeds to inscribe the book with the words ‘For Fermin Romero de Torres, who came back from the dead and who holds the key to the future’.

Who is this man and what does he want of Fermin? The answer lies in a terrible secret that has lain hidden for two decades, an epic tale of imprisonment, betrayal, murder and love that leads back into the very heart of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.

Title: The White Castle
Author: Orhan Pamuk
Translator (from Turkish): Victoria Holbrook
Publisher: Vintage International
Publishing Date: April 1998 (1990)
No. of Pages: 161

Synopsis: 

From the Nobel Prize-winning author: a dazzling novel that is at once a captivating treatise on the enigma of identity and the relations between East and West.

In the seventeenth century, a young Italian scholar sailing from Venice to Naples is taken prisoner and delivered to Constantinople. There he falls into the custody of a scholar known as Hoja – “master” – a man who is his exact double. In the years that follow, the slave instructs his master in Western science and technology, from medicine to pyrotechnics. But Hoja wants to know more: why he and his captive are the persons they are and whether, given knowledge of each other’s most intimate secrets, they could actually exchange identities. Set in a world of magnificent scholarship and terrifying savagery, The White Castle is a triumph of the imagination, as colorful and intricately patterned as a Turkish prayer rug.

Title: Cocoon
Author: Zhang Yueran
Translator (from Chinese): Jeremy Tiang
Publisher: World Editions
Publishing Date: 2022 (2016)
No. of Pages: 323

Synopsis: 

Cheng Gong and Li Jiaqi go way back. Both hailing from dysfunctional families, they grew up together in a Chinese provincial capital in the 1980s. Now, many years later, the childhood friends reunite and discover how much they still have in common. Buth have always been determined to follow the tracks of their grandparents’ generation to the heart of a mystery that perhaps should have stayed buried. What exactly happened during that rainy night in 1967, in the abandoned water tower? Zhang Yueran’s layered and hypnotic prose reveals much about the unshakable power of friendship and the existence of hope. Hers is a unique fresh voice representing a new generation of important young writers from China, shedding a different light on the country’s recent past.

Title: Wake Me Up At 9:00 in the Morning
Author: A Yi
Translator (from Chinese): Nicky Harman
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Publishing Date: 2022 (2018)
No. of Pages: 401

Synopsis: 

A thrilling journey through China’s dark criminal underworld, from a celebrated voice in Chinese literature

When Hongyang is found dead after a night of debauched drinking, it looks as if his reign of terror has finally come to an end.

Few in this insular community have much reason to mourn his passing: Hongyang is an infamous mob boss, a man with plenty of enemies. But now it seems that his years of crime have also earned him some very dangerous friends.

As his funeral draws near, those who knew him come together to look back on a life characterised by corruption, deceit and a flair for violence. Their recollections will keep Hongyang’s legacy alive, with terrifying consequences.

From the master of Chinese noir fiction comes this explosive new novel about the power of one man, unraveled by a tangled web of secrets.

Title: Strange Weather in Tokyo
Author: Hiromi Kawakami
Translator (from Japanese): Allison Markin Powell
Publisher: Granta Publications
Publishing Date: 2020 (2001)
No. of Pages: 215

Synopsis: 

One night when she is drinking alone in a local bar, Tsukiko finds herself sitting next to her former high school teacher. Over the coming months they share food and drink saké, and as the seasons pass – from spring cherry blossom to autumnal mushrooms – Tsukiko and her teacher develop a hesitant intimacy that tilts awkwardly and poignantly towards love.

Title: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Author: Arundhati Roy
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
Publishing Date: 2017
No. of Pages: 438

Synopsis: 

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes us on a journey of many years – the story spooling outwards from the cramped neighbourhoods of Old Delhi into the burgeoning new metropolis and beyond, to the Valley of Kashmir and the forests of Central India, where war is peace and peace is war, and where, from time to time, ‘normalcy’ is declared.

Anjum, who used to be Aftab, unrolls a threadbare carpet in a city graveyard that she calls home. A baby appears quite suddenly on a pavement, a little after midnight, in a scribe of litter. The enigmatic S. Tilottama is as much of a presence as she is an absence in the lives of the three men who love her.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is at once an aching love story and a decisive demonstration. It is told in a whisper, in a shout, through tears and sometimes with a laugh. Its heroes are people who have been broken by the world they live in and then rescued, mended by love – and by hope. For this reason, they are as steely as they are fragile, and they never surrender. This ravishing, magnificent book reinvents what a novel can do and can be. And it demonstrates on every page the miracle of Arundhati Roy’s storytelling gifts.