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 September, let me share the book titles I acquired during the month. Like the past three months, my September purchases are more limited than usual. The past four months, albeit without design, were about holding myself up. This aligns with my New Year’s resolution to read more and buy less. Without ado, here are the books I acquired in September.

Title: House of Day, House of Night
Author: Olga Tokarczuk
Translator (from Polish): Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Publishing Date: 2023 (1998)
No. of Pages: 319

Synopsis: 

A woman settles in a remote Polish village. It has few inhabitants now, but it teems with the stories of the living and the dead. There’s the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers that he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet. There’s the man whose death – with one leg on the Polish side, one on the Czech – was an international accident. And there are the Germans who still haunt a region that not long ago they called their own. From the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, these shards piece together not only a history but a cosmology.

Another brilliant “constellation novel” in the ode of her International Booker Prize-winning Flights, House of Day, House of Night reminds us that the story of any place, no matter how humble, is boundless.

Title: The Two of Us
Author: Alberto Moravia
Translator (from Italian): Angus Davidson
Publisher: Panther
Publishing Date: 1974 (1971)
No. of Pages: 352

Synopsis: 

Federico, balding, paunchy scriptwriter is trying to crack the big time in Italian movies. But he has a few enemies to cope with – and one very big enemy in particular: his gigantic, demanding ‘manhood’, which he wryly dubs Federicus Rex. Rico and Federicus Rex are in continual conflict, Rico believing that abstinence makes the mind grow stronger, his remarkable member contradicting in a most forthright and obvious way. Together the two of them bounce through a series of hilarious, Decamoron-like sexual misadventures…

Title: I’m Not Scared
Author: Niccolò Ammaniti
Translator (from Italian): Jonathan Hunt
Publisher: Canongate
Publishing Date: 2004 (2001)
No. of Pages: 225

Synopsis: 

One relentlessly hot summer, six children explore the scorched wheat-fields that enclose their tiny community in the Italian countryside. But when the gang chances on a dilapidated and uninhabited farmhouse, nine-year-old Michele Amitrano makes a discovery so momentous he dare not tell anyone about it.

It is a secret that forces Michele to question all that surrounds him.

I’m Not Scared is a devastatingly authentic portrayal of childhood as well as a marvellous and unputdownable piece of storytelling. Acclaimed across the world, it introduces British readers to one of the most exciting new voices in contemporary fiction.

Title: Sky Burial
Author: Xinran
Translators (from Chinese): Julia Lovell and Esther Tyldesley
Publisher: Vintage
Publishing Date: 2005 (2004)
No. of Pages: 161

Synopsis: 

As a young girl in China Xinran heard a rumour about a soldier in Tibet who had been brutally fed to the vultures in a ritual known as a sky burial: the tale frightened and fascinated her. Several decades later Xinran met Shu Wen, a Chinese woman who had spent years searching for her missing husband Kejun, after he disappeared in Tibet; her extraordinary life story would unravel the legend of the sky burial. For thirty years she was lost in the wild and alien landscape of Tibet, in the vast and silent plateaux and the magisterial mountain ranges, living with communities of nomads, moving with the seasons and struggling to survive.

In this haunting book, Xinran recreates Shu Wen’s remarkable journey in a grand story of love, loss, loyalty and survival. Moving, shocking and finally enriching, Sky Burial paints a unique portrait of a woman and a land, both at the mercy of fate and politics.

Title: The Rabbit Hutch
Author: Tess Gunty
Publisher: Oneworld
Publishing Date: 2023 (2022)
No. of Pages: 346

Synopsis: 

Vacca Valle, Indiana: recently voted number 1 on Newsweek’s list of dying American cities. According to the developers, however, it’s a city with a whole history of reinvention, one that ‘buzzes with the American spirit’.

Not everyone agrees though – certainly not the residents of the Rabbit Hutch, a low-cost housing complex in the once bustling industrial centre, populated by a cast of unforgettable, disenfranchised characters. There’s an online obituary writer, a woman waging a solo campaign against rodents and most notably, eighteen-year-old Blandine, recently released from foster care and determined to stop the developers whatever the cost.

Set over one sweltering week in July, The Rabbit Hutch is a savagely beautiful and bitingly funny snapshot of contemporary America. Bold, experimental and brilliantly written, it will live in the memory long after the final page.

Title: The Secret of Secrets
Author: Dan Brown
Publisher: Doubleday
Publishing Date: 2025
No. of Pages: 671

Synopsis: 

Robert Langdon, esteemed professor of symbology, has traveled to Prague to attend a groundbreaking lecture by Katherine Solomon – a prominent noetic scientist with whom he has recently begun a romantic relationship. Katerine is on the verge of publishing a breakthrough book that contains explosive scientific discoveries about the nature of human consciousness. . . revelations that threaten to disrupt centuries of established belief.

When a brutal murder catapults the trip into chaos, Katerine suddenly goes missing – and her manuscript is destroyed. Desperate to find the woman he loves, Langdon embarks on a thrilling race through the mystical landscape of Prague, ruthlessly hunted by a powerful organization and a chilling assailant sprung from the city’s ancient mythology.

As the action expands to London and New York, Langdon plunges into the dual worlds of futuristic science and historical lore – navigating a labyrinth of codes and symbols. . . and finally uncovering a shocking truth about a secret project that will forever change the way we think about the human world.