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 books I will be reading this spring season.

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: One Part Woman
Author: Perumal Murugan
Translator (from Tamil): Aniruddhan Vasudevan
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 2014
No. of Pages: 240

Synopsis: 

Kali and Ponna’s efforts to conceive a child have been in vain. Hounded by the taunts and insinuations of others, all their hopes come to converge on the chariot festival in the temple of Maadhorubaagan, the half-female god. Everything hinges on the one night when rules are relaxed and consensual union between any man and woman is sanctioned. This night could end the couple’s suffering and humiliation. But it will also put their marriage to the ultimate test.

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: Rich Like Us
Author: Nayantara Sahgal
Publisher: Sceptre
Publishing Date: 1987
No. of Pages: 266

Synopsis: 

A story of India: the recent India of Mrs Gandhi’s Emergency when power became arbitrary once more, when – as always in such times -the corrupt, the opportunists, and the bully flourished.

A story of an older India, of a generation who remember the British Raj and Partition, of the continuities and the ties of family and caste and religion that stretch back and back.

But above all, and memorably, it is a story of people: of Rose, the Cockney memsahib, of Western-educated Sonali and traditionally brought-up Mona, of Ravi, Marxist turned placeman, and Kishori Lal, the old idealist who finds that once again a man can be imprisoned just for what he thinks..

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: 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.