Hello, readers! It is Monday again! As it is Monday, welcome to another #5OnMyTBR update. The rule is relatively simple. I must pick five books from my to-be-read piles that fit the week’s theme.

This week’s theme: No Prompt

Because there is still no prompt this week, I decided to feature works of Asian writers. This is in line with my current reading motif. After spending the first quarter of the year reading works of East Asian writers, I have decided to venture into the even more extensive world of Asian literature. Without ado, here are some works written by Asian writers I am looking forward to.

5OnMyTBR is a bookish meme hosted by E. @ Local Bee Hunter’s Nook where you chose five books from your to-be-read pile that fit that week’s theme. If you’d like more info, head over to the announcement post!

Title: Chemmeen
Author: Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai
Translator (from Malayalam): Anita Nair
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Publishing Date: 2011
No. of Pages: 238

Synopsis: 

First published in 1956, Chemmeen was adapted into a film of the same name, and won critical acclaim as well as unprecedented commercial success. A deeply affecting story of love and loss set amidst a fishing community in Kerala, the novel transports us into the lives and minds of its characters, Karuthamma and Pareekutty, whose love remains outside the bounds of religion, caste, and marriage. Then, one night, Karuthamma and Pareekutty meet and their love is rekindled while Palani, Karuthamma’s husband, is at sea, baiting a shark.

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: Bamboo in the Wind
Author: Azucena Grajo Uranza
Publisher: The Bookmark, Inc.
Publishing Date: 2002 (1990)
No. of Pages: 539

Synopsis: 

Larry Esteva, coming home from studies in Boston, witnesses at the airport a riotous demonstration that is forcibly dispersed by the military. The end of his journey turns out to be the beginning of an odyssey in his beloved city where he finds “an insidious lawlessness creeping upon the land.”

Set in Manila in the last beleaguered months before the politico-military take-over in 1972, Bamboo in the Wind tells of the last desperate efforts of a people fighting to stave off disaster. Amid the escalating madness of a regime gone berserk, an odd assortment of people – a senator, a young nationalist, a dispossessed farmer, a radical activist, a convent school girl, a Jesuit scholastic – make their way along the labyrinthine corridors of greed and power. Each is forced to examine his own commitment in the face of brutality and evil, as the book conjures up scene after scene of devastation: the massacre of the demonstrators, the demolition of Sapang Bato, the murder of the sugar plantation workers, the burning of the Laguardia ricefields. And, as a climax to the mounting violence, that final September day – the arrests, the torture, and finally the darkness that overtakes the land.

Title: War Trash
Author: Ha Jin
Publisher: Vintage International
Publishing Date: May 2015
No. of Pages: 350

Synopsis: 

Ha Jin’s masterful new novel casts a searchlight into a forgotten corner of modern history, the experience of Chinese soldiers held in U.S. POW camps during the Korean War. In 1951 Yu Yuan, a scholarly and self-effacing clerical officer in Mao’s “volunteer” army, is taken prisoner south of the Thirty-eighth Parallel. Because he speaks English, he soon becomes an intermediary between his compatriots and their American captors.

With Yuan as guide, we are ushered into the secret world behind the barbed wire, a world in which kindness alternates with blinding cruelty and one has infinitely more to fear from one’s fellow prisoners than from the guards. Vivid in its historical detail, profound in its imaginative empathy, war Trash is Ha Jin’s most ambitions book to date.

Title: Novel Without a Name
Author: Dương Thu Hương
Translators (from Vietnamese): Phan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 1996
No. of Pages: 289

Synopsis: 

Twenty-eight-year-old Quan has been fighting for the Communist case in North Vietnam for a decade. Filled with idealism and hope when he first left his village, he now spends his days and nights dodging stray bullets and bombs, foraging for scraps of food to feed himself and his men. Quan seeks comfort in childhood memories as he tries to sort out his conflicting feelings of patriotism and disillusionment. Then, given the chance to return to his home, Quan undertakes a physical and mental journey that brings him face to face with figures from his past – his angry father, his childhood sweetheart, his boyhood friends now maimed or dead – and ultimately to the shattering reality that his innocence has been irretrievably lost in the wake of the war. In a voice both lyrical and stark, Dương Thu Hương, one of Vietnam’s most beloved writers, powerfully conveys the conflict that spiritually destroyed her generation.

Title: The Guide
Author: R.K. Narayan
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 1985
No. of Pages: 220
Synopsis: 

Release from jail, Raju – once India’s most corrupt tourist-guide – takes refuge in an abandoned temple. A peasant mistakes him for a holy man, and gradually, reluctantly, Raju begins to play the part. Villagers bring him offerings; he even grows a magnificent beard. Then God Himself decides to put Raju’s new holiness to the test. . . .