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 no prompt this week, I decided to feature books that nearly won the Booker Prize. They were just a step away from being the winner of one of the most prestigious literary prizes out there. Further, the Booker Prize is about to announce the 2025 winner today. Below is the shortlist this year. Which book do you think will win? Of the six books on the shortlist, I have read just one, David Szalay’s Flesh. It is an interesting read and has all the elements that embody the Booker Prize spirit.

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: Solomon Gursky Was Here
Author: Mordecai Richler
Publisher: Vintage
Publishing Date: 1991
No. of Pages: 507
Year Shortlisted: 1990

Synopsis: 

Berger, son of the failed poet L.B. Berger, is in the grips of an obsession. The Gursky family with its colourful bootlegging history, its bizarre connections with the North and the Inuit, and its wildly eccentric relations, both fascinates and infuriates him. His quest to unravel their story leads to the enigmatic Ephraim Gursky: document forger in Victorian England, sole survivor of the ill-fated Franklin expedition and charismatic religious leader of the Arctic. Of Ephraim’s three grandsons, Bernard has fought, wheeled and cheated his way to the head of a liquor empire. His brother Morrie has reluctantly followed along. But how does Ephraim’s protege, Solomon, fit in? Elusive, mysterious and powerful, Solomon Gursky hovers in the background, always out of Moses’ grasp, but present-like an omen. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: The Moor’s Last Sigh
Author: Salman Rushdie
Publisher: QPD
Publishing Date: 1995
No. of Pages: 434
Year Shortlisted: 1995

Synopsis: 

’Mine is the story of the fall from grace of a high-born crossbreed – me, Moraes Zogoiby, called ‘Moor’, for most of my life is the only heir to the spice-trade-‘n’-big-business millions of the da Gama-Zogoiby dynasty of Cochin – and of my banishment by my mother Aurora, nee da Gama, most illustrious of our modern artists.’

It began with the watery disappearance of Great-Grandfather Francisco, swallowed by the bustling lagoon lapping his island mansion; and with the catastrophic family conflict that followed, an epic battle that led to torched cashew orchards, smouldering cardamom groves, and murders. Thus was a family divided, not just by greed and secrets, but by chalk lines drawn across floors, like frontiers, and spice-sacks piled up across courtyards, as though they were defences.

(Years later, Bombay would also go up in flames, victim of its own fatal divisions.)

Once a year, high above massed festival crowds, her white hair flying in long loose exclamations, her ankles a-ingle with silver bell-bracelets, Aurora would dance her rebellion against India’s immense perversity. And, in magical charcoal and oils, she tried to heal what-could-not-be-kept-whole, laying bare, on gallery walls, the secrets of her family and times.

From the Paradise of Aurora’s legendary salon to his omnipotent father’s sky-garden atop a towering glass high-rise built by invisible men, the Moor’s breathless story unfolds his family’s often grotesque but compulsively moving fortunes, and the tragi-comic transformations wrought by love.

Surpassing even the imaginative brilliance of Midnight’s Children, The Moor’s Last Sigh is spectacularly ambitious, funny, satirical, and compassionate. It is a love song to a vanishing world, but also its last hurrah.

Title: Alias Grace
Author: Margaret Atwood
Publisher: Virago
Publishing Date: 1998
No. of Pages: 542
Year Shortlisted: 1996

Synopsis: 

Sometimes I whisper it over to myself: Murderess. Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt along the floor” Grace Marks. Female fiend? Femme fatale? Or weak and unwilling victim?

Around the true story of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the 1840s, Margaret Atwood has created an extraordinarily potent tale of sexuality, cruelty and mystery.

Title: In The Country of Men
Author: Hisham Matar
Publisher: Viking
Publishing Date: 2006
No. of Pages: 245
Year Shortlisted: 2006

Synopsis: 

On a white-hot day in Tripoli, Libya, in the summer of 1979, nine-year-old Suleiman is shopping in the market square with his mother. His father is away on business – but Suleiman is sure he has just seen him, standing across the street in a pair of dark glasses. But why isn’t he waving? And why doesn’t he come over when he knows Suleiman’s mother is falling apart?

Whispers and fears intensify around Suleiman: his best friend’s father disappears and is next seen being interrogated on state television; a man parks his car outside the house every day and asks strange questions: and his mother frantically burns his father’s books. As Suleiman begins to wonder whether his father has disappeared for good, it feels as if the walls of his home will break with the secrets that are being held within.

In deceptively simple prose Hisham Matar has written a novel of devastating power. A deeply affecting story of love and betrayal, In the Country of Men goes to the very heart of the cruelties and frailties of human experience.

Title: The Night Watch
Author: Sarah Waters
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Publishing Date: 2006
No. of Pages: 446
Year Shortlisted: 2006

Synopsis: 

Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked-out streets, illicit partying, and sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch tells the story of four Londoners – three women and a young man with a past – whose lives, and those of their friends and lovers, connect in sometimes surprising ways. In wartime London, the women work – as ambulance drivers, ministry clerks, and building inspectors. There are feats of heroism, epic and quotidian, and tragedies both enormous and personal, but it is the emotional inner lives of her characters that Sarah Waters captures with absolute truth and intimacy.

Waters describes with perfect knowingness the taut composure of a rescue worker in the aftermath of a bombing, the idle longing of a young woman for her soldier lover, the peculiar thrill of a convict watching the sky ignite through the bars on his window, the hunger of a woman prowling the streets for an encounter, and the panic of another who sees her love affair coming to an end. .At the same time, Waters is in absolute control of a narrative that offers up stunning surprises and exquisite turns, even as it depicts the impact of grand historical events on individual lies.

Tender, tragic, and beautifully poignant, The Night Watch is a towering achievement and confirms its author as “one of the best storytellers alive today” (The Independent on Sunday)

Title: Arthur & George
Author: Julian Barnes
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
Publishing Date: 2005
No. of Pages: 357
Year Shortlisted: 2005

Synopsis: 

Arthur and George grow up worlds apart in late-nineteenth-century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village. Arthur becomes a doctor, then a writer; George a solicitor in Birmingham. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, while George remains in hard-working obscurity. But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a sequence of events which made sensational headlines at the time as The Great Wyrley Outrages.

With a mixture of intense research and vivid imagination, Julian Barnes brings to life not just this long-forgotten case, but the inner workings of these two very different men. This is a novel in which the events of a hundred years ago constantly set off contemporary echoes, a novel about low crime and high spirituality, guilt and innocence, identity, nationality and race. Most of all it is a profound and moving meditation on the fateful differences between what we believe, what we know and what we can prove.

Julian Barnes has long been recognised as one of Britain’s most remarkable writers. While those already familiar with his work will enjoy its originality, its wit, its wisdom about the human condition, Arthur & George will surely find him an entirely new audience.

Title: The Year of the Runaways
Author: Sunjeev Sahota
Publisher: Picador
Publishing Date: 2015
No. of Pages: 468
Year Shortlisted: 2015

Synopsis: 

Three young men from very different backgrounds come together in a journey from India to England, where they hope to begin something new. To support their families, where they can, to build their future, to show their worth, to escape the past. They have almost no idea of what awaits them.

In a dilapidated shared house in Sheffield, Tarlochan, a former rickshaw driver, will say nothing about his life in Bihar. Avtar has a secret that binds him to the unpredictable Randeep. Randeep, in turn, has a visa-wife in a flat on the other side of town, whose cupboards are full of her husband’s clothes, in case the immigration men surprise her with a visit.

She is Narinder, and her story is the most surprising of them all.

Utterly absorbing and beautiful in its scope, The Year of the Runaways is written with compassion and touched by grace. As Tochi, Avtar, Randeep and Narinder negotiate their dreams, desires and shocking realities, as their histories continue to pull at them, as the seasons pass, what emerges is a novel of overwhelming humanity: one which asks how far we can decide our own course in life, and what we should do for love, for faith, and for family.