And just like that, we are already halfway through the year. How time flies! The first half of the year has zoomed past us. How has life been? I hope 2025 treated you well. I hope everyone was treated with kindness. If not, I hope that the coming months will be brimming with positive changes, growth, development, life-changing lessons, and blessings. I hope 2025 will go well for everyone. I hope everyone’s wishes and prayers will be answered. But before I could wave goodbye to June, let me share the book titles I acquired during the month. A stark contrast to May, when I acquired several books, June was about holding myself up. I acquired significantly fewer books compared to May. This is in line with my New Year’s resolution of reading more and buying less. Without ado, here are the books I acquired in June.

Title: Abigail
Author: Magda Szabó
Translator (from Hungarian): Len Rix
Publisher: New York Review Books
Publishing Date: 2020 (1970)
No. of Pages: 333

Synopsis: 

Abigail, the story of a headstrong teenager growing up during World War II, is the most beloved of Magda Szabó’s books in her native Hungary. Gina is the only child of a general, a widower who has long been happy to spoil his bright and willful daughter. Gina is devastated when the general tells her that he will be sending her to boarding school in the country. She is even more aghast at the grim religious institution to which she soon finds herself consigned. She fights with her fellow students, rebels against her teachers, is completely ostracized, and finally runs away. Caught and brought back, Gina can only entrust her fate to the legendary Abigail, as the classical statue of a woman with an urn that stands on the school’s grounds has come to be called. If you’re in trouble, it’s said, leave a message with Abigail and help will be on the way. And for Gina, who is in much deeper trouble than she could possibly suspect, a life-changing adventure is only beginning.

There is something of Jane Austen in this story of the deceptiveness of appearances; fans of J.K. Rowling are sure to enjoy Szabó’s picture of irreverent students, eccentric teachers, and boarding-school life. Above all, however, Abigail is a thrilling tale of suspense.

Title: The Passengers on the Hankyu Line
Author: Hiro Arikawa
Translator (from Japanese): Allison Markin Powell
Publisher: Berkley
Publishing Date: 2025 (2008)
No. of Pages: 234

Synopsis: 

Between the two beautiful towns of Takarazuka and Nishinomiya, in a stunning mountainous area of Japan, rattles the Hankyu Line train. Passengers step on and off, lost in thought, contemplating the tiny knots of their existence. On the outbound journey, we are introduced to the emotional dilemmas of five characters, and on the return journey six months later, we watch them find resolutions.

A young man meets the young woman who always happens to borrow a library book just before he can check it out himself. A woman in a white bridal dress boards looking inexplicably sad. A university student heads home after class. A girl prepares to leave her abusive boyfriend. And a grandmother discusses adopting a dog with her granddaughter.

With stories that crisscross like the railway lines, the Hankyu train trundles on, propelling the lives and loves of its passengers ever forward.

Title: Madonna in a Fur Coat
Author: Sabahattin Ali
Translator (from Turkish): Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 2021 (1943)
No. of Pages: 168

Synopsis: 

A shy young man leaves his home in rural Turkey to learn a trade in 1920s Berlin. The city’s crowded streets, thriving arts scene, passionate politics and seedy cabarets provide the backdrop for a chance meeting with a woman, which will haunt him for the rest of his life. Emotionally powerful, intensely atmospheric and touchingly profound, Madonna in a Fur Coat is an unforgettable novel about new beginnings and the unfathomable nature of the human soul. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: Transit
Author: Anna Seghers
Translator (from German): Margot Bettauer Dembo
Publisher: New York Review Books
Publishing Date: 2013 (1951)
No. of Pages: 252

Synopsis: 

Anna Seghers’ Transit is an existential, political, literary thriller that explores the agonies of boredom, the vitality of storytelling, and the plight of the exile with extraordinary compassion and insight.

Having escaped from a Nazi concentration camp in Germnay in 1937, and later a camp in Rouen, the nameless twenty-seven-year-old German narrator of Seghers’s multilayered masterpiece ends up in the dusty seaport of Marseille. Along the way he is asked to deliver a letter to a man named Weidel in Paris and discovers Weidel has committed suicide, leaving behind a suitcase containing letters and the manuscript of a novel. As he makes his way to Marseille to find Weidel’s wife, the narrator assumes the identity of a refugee named Seidler, though the authorities think he is really Weidel. There in the giant waiting room of Marseille, the narrator converses with the refugees, listening to their stories over pizza and wine, while also gradually piecing together the story of Weidel, whose manuscript has sharttered the narrator’s “deathly boredom,” bringing him to a deeper awareness of the transitory world the refugees inhabit as they wait and wait for that most precious of possessions: transit papers.