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.

For now, I have chosen to feature books with people, whether an individual or a group, on the cover.

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: Peter Camenzind
Author: Hermann Hesse
Translator (from German): W.J. Strachan
Publisher: Peter Owen
Publishing Date: 2002
No. of Pages: 174

Synopsis: 

Peter Camenzind is the novel that ensured Hermann Hesse’s early literary reputation. Its semi-autobiographical basis gives us an important glimpse into the development of his beliefs and concerns, in particular the struggle of an artist to achieve a personal aesthetic ideal within a materialist and uncomprehending society.

Peter Camenzind is an introverted peasant boy, who becomes a student at Zurich University. He seems destined for some minor academic post, yet he does not choose this path, instead seeking enlightenment and self-knowledge in travel and worldly pleasures. But this salvation proves hard to attain, and it is not until he returns to his home village to care for his dying father that he can find the path that leads back to himself.

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 Remembered Soldier
Author: Anjet Daanje
Translator (from Dutch): David McKay
Publisher: New Vessel Press
Publishing Date: 2025 (2019)
No. of Pages: 562

Synopsis:

Flanders 1922. After serving as a soldier in the Great War, Noon Merckem has lost his memory and lives in a psychiatric asylum. Countless women, responding to a newspaper ad, visit him there in the hope of finding their spouse who vanished in battle. One day a woman, Julienne, appears and recognizes Noon as her husband, the photographer Amand Coppens, and takes him home against medical advice. But their miraculous reunion doesn’t turn out the way that Julienne wants her envious friends to believe. Only gradually do the two grow close, and Amand’s biography is pieced together on the basis of Julienne’s stories about him. But how can he be certain that she’s telling the truth? In The Remembered Soldier, Anjet Daanje immerses us in the psyche of a war-traumatized man who has lost his identity. When Amand comes to doubt Julienne’s word, the reader is caught up in a riveting spiral of confusion that only the greatest of literature can achieve.

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: The Misunderstanding
Author: Irène Némirovsky
Translator (from French): Sandra Smith
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
Publishing Date: 2012 (1926)
No. of Pages: 160

Synopsis:

Yves Harteloup, scarred by the war, is a disappointed young man, old money fallen on hard times, who returns for the summer to the rich, comfortable Atlantic resort of Hendaye, where he spent blissful childhood holidays. He becomes infatuated by a beautiful, bored young woman, Denise, whose rich husband is often away on business. Intoxicated by summer nights and Yves’ intensity, Denise falls passionately in love, before the idyll has to end and Yves must return to his mundane office job.

In the mournful Paris autumn their love founders on mutual misunderstanding, in the apparently unbridgeable gap between a life of idle wealth and the demands of making a living, between a woman’s needs and a man’s way of loving. As Denise is driven mad with desire and jealous suspicion, Yves, too sure of her, tortures himself and her with his emotional ambivalence. Taking her sophisticated mother’s advice, Denise takes action… which she may regret forever.

With a sharp satirical eye and a characteristic perception for the fault lines in human relationships, Irène Némirovsky’s first novel shows sure signs of the brilliant novelist she was to become.