Happy Tuesday everyone! As it is Tuesday, it is time for a Top Ten Tuesday update. Top Ten Tuesday is an original blog meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and is currently being hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl.
This week’s given topic: Books on My Summer 2026 to-Read List
Title: Sisters in Yellow
Author: Mieko Kawakami
Translators (from Japanese): Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Publishing Date: 2026 (2023)
No. of Pages: 430
Synopsis:
Hana has nothing – she’s fifteen years old and living in a tiny apartment in a suburb of Tokyo with her young mother, a hostess at a local dive bar. They have no money, no security. Then Kimiko appears. She’s a bright light in Hana’s dark world. Together they set up Lemon, a bar that, despite its shabby setting and seedy clientele, becomes a haven for Hana. Suddenly she has a job she loves, friends to share her days with, and the glittering promise of money. She feels like a normal girl. She feels invincible.
But in the narrow alleys of Sangenjaya, nothing is as it seems. Soon all of Hana’s hope, her optimism, and her drive will be pushed to the limit…
A story of enduring friendship and deep betrayal, Sisters in Yellow is a masterpiece of teenage dreams and adult cruelties that confirms Mieko Kawakami as one of the great writers of her generation.
Title: Homeland Elegies
Author: Ayad Akhtar
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Publishing Date: May 2021
No. of Pages: 343
Synopsis:
A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at tis heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home.
Ayad Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrants live in fear, and where the nation’s unhealed wounds wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerrilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one – least of all himself – in the process.
Title: The Inheritance of Loss
Author: Kiran Desai
Publisher: Grove Press
Publishing Date: 2006
No. of Pages: 358
Synopsis:
In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas lives an embittered judge who wants only to retire in peace, when his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, arrives on his doorstep. The judge’s cook watches over her distractedly, for his thoughts are often on his son, Biju, who is hopscotching from one gritty New York restaurant to another. Kiran Desai’s brilliant novel, published to huge acclaim, is a story of joy and despair. Her characters face numerous choices that majestically illuminate the consequences of colonialism as it collides with the modern world.
Title: Days at the Torunka Café
Author: Satoshi Yagisawa
Translator (from Japanese): Eric Ozawa
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Publishing Date: 2025 (2022)
No. of Pages: 225
Synopsis:
Tucked away on a narrow side street in Tokyo is the Torunka Café, a neighborhood nook where the passersby are as likely to be local cats as tourists. Its regulars include Chinatsu Yukimura, a mysterious young woman who always leavese behind a napkin folded into the shape of a ballerina; Hiroyuki Numata, a middle-aged man who’s returned to the neighborhood searching for the happy life he once gave up; and Shizuku Tachibana, the café owner’s teenage daughter, who is still coming to terms with her sister’s death as she falls in love for the first time.
While Torunka Café serves up a perfect cup of coffee, it also provides these sundry souls with nourishment far more lasting. Satoshi Yagisawa brilliantly illuminates the periods in our lives when we feel lost – and how we find our way again.
Title: America is Not the Heart
Author: Elaine Castillo
Publisher: Atlantic Fiction
Publishing Date: 2018
No. of Pages: 406
Synopsis:
How many lives can one person lead in a single lifetime? When Hero De Vera arrives in America, disowned by her parents in the Philippines, she’s already on her third. Her uncle, Pol, who has offered her a fresh start and a place to stay, knows not to ask about the first and second, and his younger wife, Paz, has learned enough about the might and secrecy of the De Vera family to keep her head down. Only their seven-year-old daughter, Roni, asks Hero why her hands seem to scream with hurt at the steering wheel of the car she drives to collect her from school, and only Rosalyn, the fierce but open-hearted beautician, has any hope of bringing Hero back from the dead.
Title: The Book of Intimate Grammar
Author: David Grossman
Translator (from Hebrew): Betsy Rosenberg
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publishing Date: 1994 (1991)
No. of Pages: 343
Synopsis:
David Grossman, the leading Israeli novelist of his generation, showed himself in his internationally acclaimed novel, See Under: LOVE, to be a consummate artist of the inner life of the child. Now, in his most moving and accessible novel yet, he gives us the story of the greatest and most universal tragedy, the loss of that childhood world. At twelve, Aron Kleinfeld is the ringleader among the boys in his Jerusalem neighborhood, their inspiration in dreaming up games and adventures. But as his friends begin to mature, Aron remains imprisoned for three long years in the body of a child. While Israel inches toward the Six-Day War, and while the voices of his friends change and become strange to him, Aron lives in his child body as though in a nightmare. Like a spy in enemy territory, he learns to decipher the internal codes of sexuality and desire, to understand the unyielding bureaucracy of the human body. Hurled between childhood and adulthood, between the pure and the profane, he is like a volcano of emotions and impulses. But, like his hero Houdini, Aron still struggles to escape from the trap of growing up.
The Book of Intimate Grammar is about the alchemy of childhood, which transforms loneliness and fear into creation, and about the struggle to emerge as an artist. Funny, painful, and passionate, it is a work of enormous intensity and beauty.
Title: The Beekeeper of Aleppo
Author: Christy Lefteri
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Publishing Date: 2020
No. of Pages: 307
Synopsis:
Every morning, Nuri the beekeeper rises early to hear the call to prayer before driving to his hives in the countryside. On weekends, his wife Afra, a gifted artist, sells her paintings at the open-air market in the square. They live simply, rich in family and friends, in the hills of the beautiful Syrian city of Aleppo – until the unthinkable happens. When all they love is destroyed by war, Nuri knows they have no choice except to leave their home. But escaping Syria will be no easy task: Afra has lost her sight, leaving Nuri to navigate her grief as well as a perilous journey toward an uncertain future in Britain.
Moving, intimate, and beautifully written, this is a story for our times: It reminds us that our lives can be upended instantly – and brings a journey in faraway lands close to home, never to be forgotten.
Title: The Year of the Runaways
Author: Sunjeev Sahota
Publisher: Picador
Publishing Date: 2015
No. of Pages: 468
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.
Title: The Life of an Amorous Man
Author: Ihara Saikaku
Translator (from Japanese): Chris Drake
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
Publishing Date: 2025 (1682)
No. of Pages: 380
Synopsis:
Life of an Amorous Man is a groundbreaking work by Ihara Saikaku, Japan’s first popular novelist. This new unabridged English translation includes 54 charming illustrations drawn by the author that appeared in the original 1682 Japanese edition.
The story follows Yonosuke, a passionate man whose never-ending quest for pleasure leads him from the decadent brothels of Edo (modern-day Tokyo) and elegant boudirs of Kyoto to moonlit trysts along quiet lanes in the Japanese countryside. Along the way he leaves a trail of fleeting romances and broken hearts.
Brimming with scandalous encounters and anecdotes, Yonosuke’s tale provides a candid look at the hedonistic world of Edo-period Japan (1680-1770), where courtesans, gamblers and pleasure-seekers mingle in a whirlwind of indulgence. Life of an Amorous Man was a huge success in its day and remains a celebration of life and a fascinating glimpse of a vibrant, bygone era.
Title: Suggested in the Stars
Author: Yoko Tawada
Translator (from Japanese): Margaret Mitsutani
Publisher: Granta
Publishing Date: 2024 (2020)
No. of Pages: 229
Synopsis:
Hiruko, from the now vanished archipelago ‘somewhere between China and Polynesia’, and her band of friends have searched in vain for someone who speaks her native language. They finally track down Susanoo, a sushi chef from the same nation, but there is a problem – he has lost the power of speech. As they set out to help Susanoo regain his voice, they encounter magic radios, personality swaps and a sceptical aphasia specialist, who may be Hiruko’s last hope.
The Pine-Scented Chronicles 