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 redo one of the prompts from last year. Here are some books with titles starting with a ‘C’.

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: The Captain’s Daughter
Author: Alexander Pushkin
Translator (from Russian): Anthony Briggs
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Publishing Date: 2021 (1836)
No. of Pages: 252

Synopsis: 

Pushkin’s restless and creative genius laid the foundations for Russian prose. His stories are among the greatest and most influential ever written, retain stunning directness and precision, more than ever in Anthony Brigg’s finely nuanced translations.

Upending expectations at every turn, Pushkin depicts brutal conflicts and sudden reversals of fortune with disarming lightness and sly humor These are stories of fateful chances: a stationmaster encourages his young daughter to ride to town with a traveller, only to lose her forever; a man obsessively pursues an elderly woman’s secret for success at cards, with bizarre results, in ‘The Queen of Spades’; and in The Captain’s Daughter, Pushkin’s great historical novella of love and rebellion in the era of Catherine the Great, a mysterious encounter proves fatally significant during a violent uprising.

Title: The Casualty
Author: Heinrich Böll
Translator (from German): Leila Vennewitz
Publisher: The Hogarth Press
Publishing Date: 1989 (1983)
No. of Pages: 189

Synopsis: 

In these powerful, moving stories, Heinrich Böll conveys the despair, hardship and disillusionment of ordinary Germans caught up in an absurd brutal war. The horrors war entails are unforgettably depicted, in terms of both human tragedy and spiritual degradation as Böll describes the struggle of the common man, trapped in muddy holes on the Russian front or amid the rubble of devastated cities, desperate to survive and to preserve his humanity.

Title: China Rich Girlfriend
Author: Kevin Kwan
Publisher: Anchor Books
Publishing Date: May 2016 (2015)
No. of Pages: 479

Synopsis: 

It’s the eve of Rachel Chu’s wedding, and she should be over the moon. She has a flawless oval-cut diamond, a wedding dress she loves, and a fiancé willing to thwart his meddling relatives and give up one of the biggest fortunes in Asia in order to marry her. Still, Rachel mourns the fact that her birth father, a man she never knew, won’t be there to walk her down the aisle.

Then a chance accident reveals his identity. Suddenly, Rachel is drawn into a dizzying world of Shanghai splendor, a world where people attend church in a penthouse, where exotic cars race down the boulevard, and where people aren’t just crazy rich… they’re China rich.

Title: Confessions of the Lioness
Author: Mia Couto
Translator (from Portuguese): David Brookshaw
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publishing Date: 2015 (2012)
No. of Pages: 192

Synopsis: 

Told through two haunting interwoven diaries, Mia Couto’s Confession of the Lioness reveals the enigmatic world of Kulumani, an isolated village in Mozambique whose traditions and beliefs are threatened when ghostlike lionesses begin hunting and killing the women who live there.

Mariamar, a young woman from the village, finds her life thrown into chaos just as the marksman hired to kill the lionesses, the outsider Archangel Bullseye, arrives in town. Mariamar’s sister was recently killed in one of the attacks, and her father has imprisoned her in his home, where she relives painful memories of past abuse and hopes to be rescued by Archangel. Meanwhile, Archangel attempts to track the lionesses out in the wilderness, but when he begins to suspect there is more to these predators than meets the eye, he slowly starts to lose control of his hands. The hunt grows more and more dangerous, until it’s no safer inside Kulumani than outside it. As the men of Kulumani feel increasingly threatened by the outsider, the forces of modernity upon their culture, and the animal predators closing in, it becomes clear that the lionesses might not be real lionesses at all but rather spirits conjured by the ancient witchcraft of the women themselves.

Both a riveting mystery and a poignant examination of women’s oppression, Confession of the Lionesses combines reality, superstition, and magic realism in an atmospheric, gripping novel.

Title: Cities of the Plain
Author: Cormac McCarthy
Publisher: Picador
Publishing Date: 1999 (1998)
No. of Pages: 294

Synopsis: 

In Cities of the Plain, two men marked by the boyhood adventures of All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing now stand together, between their vivid pasts and uncertain futures, to confront a country changing beyond recognition.

In the fall o f1952, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham are cowboys on a New Mexico ranch encroached upon from the north by the military. On the southern horizon are the mountains of Mexico, where one of the men is drawn again and again, in this story of friendships and passion, to a love as dangerous as it is inevitable.

Title: Chocolat
Author: Joanne Harris
Publisher: Black Swan
Publishing Date: 2019 (1999)
No. of Pages: 372

Synopsis: 

Try me… Test me… Taste me

In the small French village of Lansquenet, nothing much has changed in a hundred years. Then an exotic stranger, Vianne Rocher, blows in on the changing wind with her small daughter, and opens a chocolate boutique directly opposite the church. Soon the villagers cannot keep away, for Vianne can divine their most hidden desires.

But it’s the beginning of Lent, the season of abstinence, and Father Reynaud denounces her as a serious moral danger to his flock. Perhaps even a with…

It is twenty years since Joanne Harris first wrote about Vianne Rocher in the much-loved Chocolat. She returned to Vianne’s story in The Lollipop Shoes and Peaches for Monsieur Le Curé, and now in her new novel The Strawberry Thief.