Another month done. How time flies! How has life been? I hope 2025 has treated you well and continues to do so. I hope everyone is 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 July, let me share the book titles I acquired during the month. Like June, my July purchases are more limited. The past two months were about holding myself up. I acquired significantly fewer books compared to May. This aligns with my New Year’s resolution to read more and buy less. Without ado, here are the books I acquired in July.

Title: The History of the Siege of Lisbon
Author: José Saramago
Translator (from Portuguese): Giovanni Pontiero
Publisher: The Harvill Press
Publishing Date: 1996 (1989)
No. of Pages: 312

Synopsis: 

A humble proof-reader for a Lisbon publishing house takes it upon himself to insert a negative into the sentence of a history book, thus effectively leaving that history entirely rewritten: whatever the experts have hitherto chosen to say, the visiting crusaders did not help the King of Portugal to recapture Lisbon from the Saracens in the twelfth century. This act of gross insubordination, which might have ended Raimundo Silva’s career, has instead the unexpected result of making his superior, the fetching Maria Sara, fall in love with him, and in his middle age romance blossoms. Under her impetus the humble proof-reader rewrites the history of the siege of Lisbon in a style graphic enough to satisfy the most exigent reader of historical romances.

As in The Stone Raft, so in this new novel José Saramago challenges, and indeed teases, his readers into discarding all their preconceptions, and by a slight refocusing of the microscope, brings them to observe human relationships and motivations, past and present, in a radically different light,

Title: The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto
Author: Mario Vargas Llosa
Translator (from Spanish): Edith Grossman
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Publishing Date: 1999 (1997)
No. of Pages: 304

Synopsis: 

Don Rigoberto – by day a grey insurance executive, by night a pornographer and sexual enthusiast – misses Lucrecia, his estranged second wife. The pair separated following a sexual encounter between Lucrecia and Alfonso, Rigoberto’s son. To compensate for her absence, Rigoberto fills his notebooks with memories, fantasies and unsent letters. Meanwhile, Alfonso visits Lucrecia, determined to win her love.

In The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, Mario Vargas Llosa keeps the reader guessing which episodes are real and which issue from Rigoberto’s imagination. The novel, a wonderful mix of reality and fantasy, is sexy, funny, disquieting, and unfailingly compelling. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: Desertion
Author: Abdulrazak Gurnah
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Publishing Date: 2005
No. of Pages: 262

Synopsis: 

Early one morning in 1899, in a small town along the coast from Mombasa, Hassanali sets out for the mosque. But that morning he never gets there, for out of the desert stumbles an Englishman who collapses at his feet.

That man is Martin Pearce – writer, traveller and something of an Orientalist. He is taken to recuperate at the house of a colonial official, Frederick Turner. When Martin visits Hassanali to thank him for his rescue, he meets his sister Rehana and is immediately fascinated by her beautiful eyes and her air of tragedy. In this crumbling town on the edge of civilised life, with the empire on the brink of a new century, a passionate love affair begins that brings two cultures together and that will reverberate through three generations and across continents.

It carries its consequences to Zanzibar in the early 1950s, a country struggling with its complicated legacy of slavery and foreign rule. Here another forbidden love affair begins as Zanzibar moves inexorably towards independence – and revolution.

Through the lives of his characters Abdulrazak Gurnah creates an unforgettable portrait of a continent in upheaval. Ambitious, moving and absorbing, Desertion is a spellbinding novel from a writer at the height of his powers.

Title: Songs of Enchantment
Author: Ben Okri
Publisher: Vintage
Publishing Date: 1994 (1993)
No. of Pages: 297

Synopsis: 

One great thought can change the dreams of the world. One great action, lived out all the way to the sea, can change the history of the world.

The adventures of Azaro, the spirit child, continue. From the bestselling author of THE FAMISHED ROAD comes this radiant sequel.