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 I Want to Read by New to Me Authors 

toptentuesday

Title: What I Loved
Author: Siri Hustvedt
Publisher: Picadr
Publishing Date: 2003
No. of Pages: 367

Synopsis: 

The international bestseller What I Loved begins in New York in 1975, when art historian Leo Hertzberg discovers an extraordinary painting by an unknown artist in a SoHo gallery. He buys the work; tracks down the artist, Bill Wechsler; and the two men embark on a lifelong friendship. Leo’s story, which spans twenty-five years, follows the evolution of the growing involvement between his family and Bill’s. But the bonds between the two families are tested, first by sudden tragedy, and then by a monstrous duplicity that slowly comes to the surface. Combining the intimacy of a family saga with the suspense of a thriller, What I Loved is a deeply moving story about art, love, loss, and betrayal.

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: Gargantua and Pantagruel
Author: François Rabelais
Translator (from French): J.M. Cohen
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 1955 (1532-1564)
No. of Pages: 712

Synopsis: 

Robust parody, conceived and executed on an epic scale.

François Rabelais (c. 1494-1553), a Franciscan monk who also qualified as a Bachelor of Medicine, was at the centre of the humanist movement and had absorbed a vast amount of learning. Gargantua and Pantagruel parodies everyone from eminent classical authors and schoolmen to Rabelais’ own acquaintances. But the brilliance of the book lies not merely in these learned references, but in the seamless story into which they are woven, and in the passion and swiftness of language of an acknowledged master of satire.

When Gargantua and Pantagruel was first published, Rabelais was persecuted by his targets, the churchmen, lawyers, lecturers and savants of his time. And no wonder: the caricatures and the episodes are piled up, figure by far-fetched figure, situation by extravagant situation, to give us an extraordinary picture of the intellectual and moral life of an era.

Title: The Two of Us
Author: Alberto Moravia
Translator (from Italian): Angus Davidson
Publisher: Panther
Publishing Date: 1974 (1971)
No. of Pages: 352

Synopsis: 

Federico, balding, paunchy scriptwriter is trying to crack the big time in Italian movies. But he has a few enemies to cope with – and one very big enemy in particular: his gigantic, demanding ‘manhood’, which he wryly dubs Federicus Rex. Rico and Federicus Rex are in continual conflict, Rico believing that abstinence makes the mind grow stronger, his remarkable member contradicting in a most forthright and obvious way. Together the two of them bounce through a series of hilarious, Decamoron-like sexual misadventures…

Title: Season of Migration to the North
Author: Tayeb Salih
Translator (from Arabic): Denys Johnson-Davies
Publisher: New York Review Books
Publishing Date: 2009 (1969)
No. of Pages: 139

Synopsis: 

After years of study in Europe, the young narrator of Season of Migration to the North returns to his village along the Nile in the Sudan. It is the 1960s, and he is eager to make a contribution to the new postcolonial life of his country. Back home, he discovers a stranger among the familiar faces of childhood – the enigmatic Mustafa Sa’eed. Mustafa takes the young man into his confidence, telling him the story of his own years in London, of his brilliant career as an economist, and of the series of fraught and deadly relationships with European women that led to a terrible public reckoning and his return to his native land.

But what is the meaning of Mustafa’s shocking confession? Mustafa disappears without explanation, leaving the young man – whom he has asked to look after his wife – in an unsettled and violent no-man’s land between Europe and Africa, tradition and innovation, holiness and defilement, and man and woman, from which no one will escape unaltered or unharmed.

Season of Migration to the North is a rich and sensual work of deep honesty and incandescent lyricism. In 2001 it was selected by a panel of Arab writers and critics as the most important novel of the twentieth century.

Title: Home
Author: Marilynne Robinson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publishing Date: 2008
No. of Pages: 325

Synopsis: 

Hundreds of thousand of readers were enthralled and delighted by the luminous, tender voice of John Ames in Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Home is an entirely independent, deeply affecting work that takes place concurrently in the same Iowa town, this time in the household of Reverend Robert Boughton, Ames’s closest friend.

Glory Boughton, age thirty-eight, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Soon her brother Jack – the prodigal son of the family, gone twenty years – comes home, too, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with a past littered with trouble and pain. Jack is on e of the great characters in recent literature. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold a job, he is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton’s mot beloved child. Brilliant, lovable, and wayward, Jack forges an intense bond with Glory and engages painfully with John Ames, his godfather and namesake.

Home is a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, and the passing of generation, about love and death and faith. It is Robinson’s greatest work, an unforgettable embodiment of the deepest and most universal emotions.

Title: The Magus
Author: John Fowles
Publisher: Vintage Classics
Publishing Date: 2004 (1966)
No. of Pages: 656

Synopsis: 

On a remote Greek Island, Nicholas Urfe finds himself embroiled in the deceptions of a master trickster. As reality and illusion intertwine, Urfe is caught up in the darkest of psychological games.

John Fowles expertly unfolds a tale that is lush with overpowering imagery in a spellbinding exploration of the complexities of the human mind. By turns disturbing, thrilling and seductive, The Magus is a cerebral feast.

Title: Ravelstein
Author: Saul Bellow
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 2001 (2000)
No. of Pages: 233

Synopsis: 

Abe Ravelstein – ferocious intellectual, bestselling author, confidant of presidents and prime ministers and possessor of tastes that would bankrupt a king – is celebrating his success in Paris. He and his friend Chick trawl the Parisian streets in search of haute couture, fine foods and fresh arguments. But Ravelstein is dying and, in challenging Chick to record his life, he sets in motion their last great debate.

A tale of philosophy, love, friendship, ancient Greek recipes, mortality, vaudeville routines and $4,500 suits ensues as the two old rogues come to scrutinize their very existence.

Saul Bellow’s first novel for 13 years is an insightful, brave and funny funeral song to friendship and life.

Title: The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Author: Richard Flanagan
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
Publishing Date: 2014 (2013)
No. of Pages: 448

Synopsis: 

In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Burma Death Railway, surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle’s young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever.

Richard Flanagan’s savagely beautiful novel is a story about the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.