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

Since there is still no prompt this week, I opted to feature works of British literature, following my previous features of French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Nordic, and Balkan literature. This aligns with my pivot toward European literature, following my initial focus on works of Asian literature for the first half of the year. But since my reading list is brimming with British writers, I will be dividing this list into two, with this list featuring mainly the works of female British writers. Without ado, here are works of British literature I am looking forward to.

5OnMyTBR is a bookish meme hosted by E. @ Local Bee Hunter’s Nook where you choose 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: Wolf Hall
Author: Hilary Mantel
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Publishing Date: 2009
No. of Pages: 650

Synopsis: 

England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe oppose him. The quest for the petulant king’s freedom destroys his advisor, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum and a deadlock.

Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a bully and a charmer, Cromwell has broken all the rules of a rigid society in his rise to power, and is prepared to break some more. Rising from the ashes of personal disaster – the loss of his young family and of Wolsey, his beloved patron – he picks his way deftly through a court where ‘man is wolf to man.’ Pitting himself against parliament, the political establishment and the papacy, he is prepared to reshape England to his own and Henry’s desires.

From one of our finest living writers, Wolf Hall is that very rare thing: a truly great English novel, one that explores the intersection of individual psychology and wider politics. With a vast array of characters, and richly overflowing with incident, it peels back history to show us Tudor England as a half-made society, moulding itself with great passion and suffering and courage.

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: Hotel du Lac
Author: Anita Brookner
Publisher: Book Club Associates
Publishing Date: May 1985
No. of Pages: 184

Synopsis: 

Edith Hope is in disgrace and working out her probation on the shores of Lake Geneva. Friends and family have banished her to seemly Swiss solitude – out of season – until such time as she may recover her lost senses. Her crime? It all subtly unfolds in Hotel du Lac.

Edith reminds herself that the hotel at least provides an excellent opportunity to finish writing her latest romantic novel. Fantasy and obfuscation are her business: they are also in her nature. In the quiet opulence of the Swiss dining room pampered widows languish in luxury, providing irresistible diversion to such an imaginative and compulsive observer: the carefully elegant Iris Pusey, ‘respectable duenna’, so utterly fulfilled in her desires that she prompts daring thoughts of possession even in the likes of someone as unprepossessing as Edith; Iris’s daughter Jennifer, determinedly gamine, who has inherited her mother’s profound, if good-natured, indifference to anyone but herself. Edith finds their simple greed heartening, enviable.

Enter Mr. Neville, devil’s advocate, also spreading the gospel of seizing what you want. ‘If your capacity for bad behaviour were being properly used,’ he tells Edith, ‘you would not be moping around in that cardigan… Whoever told you that you looked like Virginia Woolf did you a grave disservice.

With characteristic wit and beautifully observed detail, Anita Brookner has created perhaps her most memorable heroine yet. Edith Hope, as reluctant to be recruited by the ultra-feminine as by feminists, adept as a romantic writer yet contending with her own puzzled view of romance comes marvellously to life in this humorous and touching new novel.

Title: 4:50 From Paddington
Author: Agatha Christie
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publishing Date: 2011
No. of Pages: 271

Synopsis: 

For an instant the two trains ran together, side by side. In that frozen moment, Elspeth witnessed a murder. Helplessly, she stared out of her carriage window as a man remorselessly tightened his grip around a woman’s throat. The body crumpled. Then the other train drew away.

But who, apart from Miss Marple, would take her story seriously? After all, there were no suspects, no other witnesses… and no corpse.

Title: Jamaica Inn
Author: Daphne Du Maurier
Publisher: Virago
Publishing Date: 2015
No. of Pages: 302

Synopsis: 

After the death of her mother, Mary Yellan crosses the windswept Cornish moors to Jamaica Inn, the home of her Aunt Patience. There she finds Patience a changed woman, downtrodden by her domineering, vicious husband Joss Merlyn. Mary discovers that the inn is a front for a lawless gang of criminals, and is unwillingly dragged into their dangerous world of smuggling and murder. Despite herself, she becomes powerfully attracted to a man she dares not trust – Joss Merly’s brother. Before long Mary will be forced to cross her own moral line to save herself.

Title: Regeneration
Author: Pat Barker
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 2008 (1991)
No. of Pages: 250

Synopsis: 

Craiglockhart War Hospital, Scotland, 1917, where army psychiatrist William Rivers is treating shell-shocked soldiers. Under his care are the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, as well as mute Billy Prior, who is only able to communicate by means of pencil and paper. Rivers’s job is to make the men in his charge healthy enough to fight. Yet the closer he gets to mending his patients’ minds, the harder becomes every decision to send them back to the horrors of the front…

Regeneration is the classic exploration of how the traumas of war brutalized a generation of young men.