Just like that, the first year of 2026 has drawn its curtains. Woah. How time flies! I hope January has been kind to everyone. As time takes its natural course, I hope you were able to kick the ground running even though, I am pretty sure, everyone suffered from post-holiday hangovers. I hope you get to generate momentum as the year moves forward. But before I could wave goodbye to the first month of the year, let me share the book titles I acquired during the month. After having a sort of book haul lockdown by acquiring less and reading more, I reversed it in January by having a book haul binge-buying fest. I guess I am making up for lost time. Since I have acquired more than usual, I will be dividing this book haul update into two. This will feature novels originally written in English. Without ado, here is the first set of books I acquired in January.

Title: The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
Author: Dinaw Mengestu
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Publishing Date: 2007
No. of Pages: 228

Synopsis: 

Seventeen years ago, Sepha Stephanos fled the Ethiopian revolution for a new start in the United States. Now he finds himself running a failing grocery store in a poor African-American section of Washington, D.C., his only companions two fellow African immigrants who share his bitter nostalgia and longing for his home continent. Years ago and worlds away Sepha could never have imagined a life of such isolation. As his neighborhood begins to change, hope comes in the form of a friendship with new neighbors Juding and Naomi, a white woman and her biracial daughter. But when a series of racial incidents disturbs the neighborhood, Sepha may lose everything all over again.

Title: Concrete Island
Author: J.G. Ballard
Publisher: Picador
Publishing Date: 2014 (1973)
No. of Pages: 156

Synopsis: 

Robert Maitland, a thirty-five-year-old architect, is driving home from his London offices when a blowout sends his speeding Jaguar hurtling out of control. After smashing through a temporary barrier, he finds himself dazed and disorientated on a traffic island below three converging motorways. But when he tries to climb the embankment or flag down a passing car for help, it proves impossible – and he finds himself imprisoned on the concrete island. Maitland must survive using only what he can find in his crashed car.

As in all J.G. Ballard’s best work, Concrete Island provides an unnerving study of our modern lives and world. With his alienating, “Ballardian” view of normal events, this is a unique novel from one of the twentieth century’s finest writers.

Title: The Professor
Author: Charlotte Brontë
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Publishing Date: 1989 (1857)
No. of Pages: 291

Synopsis: 

Even after the resounding triumph of Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë could persuade no one to publish The Professor, her first novel.

This story of William Crimsworth, who goes to Brussels to seek his fortune, falls in love with Frances, a schoolteacher and lace-maker, and is himself pursued by Mlle Reuter, has often been dismissed as merely an abortive draft of Villette.

Yet Charlotte Brontë always stubbornly defended the novel, and in a brilliant critical introduction Heather Glen argues for a new reading of The Professor as a subtle portrayal of a self-made man and his relationships – power relations – in an individualistic society that worships property and propriety. In this peculiarly ambiguous and disturbing love story Charlotte Brontë thus reveals herself as a social critic of insight and power.

Title: The Return of the Native
Author: Thomas Hardy
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Publishing Date: 1999 (1878)
No. of Pages: 396

Synopsis: 

Tempestuous Eustacia Vye passes her days dreaming of passionate love and the escape it may bring from the small community of Egdon Heath. Hearing that Clym Yeobright is to return from Paris, she sets her heart on marrying him, believing that through him she can leave rural life and find fulfilment elsewhere. But she is to be disappointed, for Clym has dreams of his own, and they have little in common with Eustacia’s. Their unhappy marriage causes havoc in the lives of those close to them, in particular Damon Wildeve, Eustacia’s former lover, Clym’s mother and his cousin Thomasin. The Return of the Native illustrates the tragic potential of romantic illusion and how its protagonists fail to recognize their opportunities to control their own destinies.

Penny Boumelha’s introduction examines the classical and mythological references and the interplay of class and sexuality in the novel. This edition, essentially Hardy’s original book version of the novel, also includes notes, a glossary, a chronology and a bibliography.

Title: The Cemetery of Untold Stories
Author: Julia Alvarea
Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Publishing Date: 2024
No. of Pages: 237

Synopsis: 

Alma Cruz, the celebrated writer at the heart of The Cemetery of Untold Stories, doesn’t want to end up like her friend, a novelist who fought so long and hard to finish a book that it threatened her sanity. So when Alma inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, her homeland, she has the beautiful idea of turning it into a place to bury her untold stories – literally. She creates a graveyard for the manuscript drafts and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her.

Alma wants her characters to rest in peace. But they have other ideas and soon begin to defy their author: they talk back to her and talk to one another behind her back, rewriting and revising themselves. Filomena, a local woman hired as the groundskeeper, becomes a sympathetic listener to the secret tales unspooled by Alma’s characters. Among them, Bienvenida, dictator Rafael Trujillo’s abandoned wife who was erased from the official history, and Manuel Cruz, a doctor who fought in the Dominican underground and escaped to the United States.

The Cemetery of Untold Stories asks: Whose stories get to be told, and whose buried? Finally, Alma finds the meaning she and her characters yearn for in the everlasting vitality of stories. Julia Alvarez reminds us that the narratives of our lives are never truly finished, even at the end.

Title: Necessary Fiction
Author: Eloghosa Osunde
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Publishing Date: 2025
No. of Pages: 302

Synopsis: 

What makes a family? Who gets to define it? Is freedom for everyone?

In Necessary Fiction, Eloghosa Osunde’s characters search for answers to these provocative questions as they stake lives for themselves in one of the world’s most dynamic cities: Lagos, Nigeria. Vibrantly active, brazenly flawed, and stubbornly themselves, they test the limits of their relationships – with society, relatives, and one another – as they pursue love, community, and happiness. As they navigate the worlds of art, music, creative commerce, and beyond, each of them reveals how they reckon with the necessary fiction they carry for survival.

Unexpected and insightful, Necessary Fiction is a wise and poignant novel about love, desire, one’s chosen family, and what it costs to create a life worth inhabiting.

Title: Which Side Are You On
Author: Ryan Lee Wong
Publisher: Catapult
Publishing Date: 2022
No. of Pages: 171

Synopsis: 

How can we live with integrity and pleasure in this world of police brutality and racism? An Asian American activist is challenged by his mother to face this question in this powerful-and funny-debut novel of generational change, a mother’s secret and an activist’s coming-of-age.

Twenty-one-year-old Reed is fed up. Angry about the killing of a Black man by an Asian American NYPD officer, he wants to drop out of college and devote himself to the black Lives Matter movement. But would that truly bring him closer to the moral life he seeks?

In a series of intimate, charged conversations, his mother-once the leader of a Korean-Black coalition-demands that he rethink his outrage, and along with it, what it means to be an organizer, a student, an ally, an American, and a son. As Reed zips around his hometown of Los Angeles with his mother, searching and questioning, he faces a revelation that will change everything.

Inspired by his family’s roots in activism, Ryan Lee Wong offers an extraordinary debut novel that is as humorous as it is profound, a celebration of seeking a life that is both virtuous and fun, an ode ot mothering and being mothered.