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 planned to feature works of Philippine literature in light of my country’s Independence Day celebration later this week. However, I already featured works of Philippine Literature in a previous 5 on my TBR post. As such, I decided to feature books on my reading list with titles starting with the letter P, for Philippines. Without ado, here are books with titles starting with the letter P.

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: The Pact We Made
Author: Layla Alammar
Publisher: The Borough Press
Publishing Date: 2019
No. of Pages: 274

Synopsis: 

Dahlia has two lives. In one, she is a young woman with a good job, great friends and a busy social life. I the other, she is an unmarried daughter living at home, struggling with a burgeoning anxiety disorder and a deeply buried secret: a violent betrayal too shameful to speak of.

With her thirtieth birthday fast approaching, pressure from her mother to accept a marriage proposal begins to strain the family. As her two lives start to collide and fracture, all Dahlia can think of is escape: something that seems impossible when she can’t even leave the country without her father’s consent.

But what if Dahlia does have a choice? What if all she needs is the courage to make it?

Set in contemporary Kuwait, The Pact We Made is a deeply affecting and timely debut about family, secrets and one woman’s search for a different life.

Title: Panorama
Author: Dušan Šarotar
Translator (from Slovene): Rawley Grau
Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers
Publishing Date: 2016 (2014)
No. of Pages: 206

Synopsis: 

Deftly blending fiction, history, and journalism, Dušan Šarotar takes the reader on a deeply reflective yet kaleidoscopic journey from northern to southern Europe. In a manner reminiscent of W.G. Sebald, he supplements his engrossing narrative with photographs , which help to blur the lines between fiction and journalism. The writer’s experience of landscape is bound up in a [ersona yet elusive search for self-discovery, as he and a diverse group of international fellow travellers relate in their distinctive and memorable voices their unique stories and common quest for somewhere they might call home.

Title: Persuasion
Author: Jane Austen
Publisher: Vintage Classics
Publishing Date: 2008 (1818)
No. of Pages: 249

Synopsis: 

Eight years ago Anne Elliot bowed to pressure from her family and made the decision not to marry the man she loved, Captain Wentworth. Now circumstances have conspired to bring him back into her social circle and Anne finds her old feelings for him reignited. However, when they meet again Wentworth behaves as if they are strangers and seems more interested in her friend Louisa. With humour, insight and tenderness, Jane Austen tells the story of a love that endures the tests of time and society.

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 Plotters
Author: Un-Su Kim
Translator (from Korean): Sora Kim-Russell
Publisher: Doubleday
Publishing Date: 2019
No. of Pages: 292

Synopsis: 

Behind every assassination, there is an anonymous mastermind, a plotter, working in the shadows. Plotters quietly dictate the moves of Seoul’s most dangerous criminals, but their existence is little more than legend. Just who are the plotters? And more important, what do they want?

Reseng is a seasoned assassin. Orphaned at birth and raised by a cantankerous killer named Old Raccoon in the criminal headquarters “the library,” Reseng never questioned anything: where to go, who to kill, or why his home was filled with books that no one but him ever read. But one day, a job goes wrong, toppling a set of carefully calibrated plans. And when he uncovers an extraordinary scheme set into motion by an eccentric trio of young women – a convenience store clerk, her wheelchair-bound sister, and a cross-eyed librarian – Reseng has to decide if he will remain a pawn or finally take control of the plot.

Un-Su Kim has crafted a fiercely original and literary novel crackling with action, unforgettable characters, humor, and soul. But make no mistake, The Plotters is a top-notch thriller in which the gun is always loaded, the knife is always sharpened, and you should think twice about getting a cut and shave from someone called the Barber.

Title: The Prophets of Eternal Fjord
Author: Kim Leine
Translator (from Danish): Martin Aitken
Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publishing Date: 2015 (2012)
No. of Pages: 559

Synopsis: 

From the swarming streets of Copenhagen to the frozen villages of Greenland, The Prophets of Eternal Fjord is a grand, magisterial story of epic proportion. Earning rave reviews and scores of readers across the world, Kim Leine’s masterpiece – sweeping across the sea in a whaler and scurrying, panicked, from the Great Fire of 1795 – arrives on American shores erupting with pathos, lust, faith lost and found, and a cast of characters clinging to life amid persecution and calamity.

Idealistic, foolhardy Morten Falck, the hapless hero, is a newly ordained priest sailing to Greenland in 1787 to convert the Inuit to the Danish church. He’s rejected the prospect of a sleepy posting in a local parish and instead departs for the forsaken Sukkertoppen colony, where he will endeavor to convert the locals A town battered by unremittingly harsh winters and simmering with the threat of dissent, it is a far cry from the parish he envisioned; natives from neighboring villages have unified to reject colonial rule and establish their own settlement atop Eternal Fjord. A bumbling and at times terrifically destructive mix of Shakespeare’s Falstaff and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Arthur Dimmesdale, he’s woefully ill prepared to confront this new sect. Torn between his instinctive compassion for the rebel congregation perched atop Eternal Fjord and his duty to the church, Falck is forced to decide where he belongs. His exploits in this brutal backwater include an accidental explosion after a night curled around a keg, a botched surgery, a love affair with a solitary and fatalistic widow, and an apprenticeship with an eager young scholar that ends in tragedy.

Based on authentic events in the 1780s and ’90s, The Prophets of Eternal Fjord moves from the quiet rooms of the Copenhagen bourgeoisie to the stark, hardscrabble village of the Fjord where Falck finds himself – surprisingly – at home. Leine’s textured, earthy prose evokes the sting of the cold, the itch of the wool, and the burn of the roughest swig of aquavit. In gritty detail, Leine reveals the corrosive effects of colonial rule – both on the colonized, bitterly ground down as they are, and on the colonizers, compromised and corrupted by their baseless power.

In rich, Dickensian descriptions, Leine charts the tragic events that intertwine seemingly disparate lives, illuminating the brutal and tender impulses of those seeking redemption and the shifting line between religion and mysticism. The Prophets of Eternal Fjord is a visceral panorama of a fragile colony caught in the throes of history, making the American debut of a major international writer.