The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami is a Japanese novel published in 1994-95. The book has a total page count of 607- which is longer than most of Haruki Murakami’s other acclaimed works.

Murakami is a very famous author- in fact, one of the very people who have huge support and fan following to win the next nobel prize in terms of critics as well as everyday literature readers. His language is uniquely simple, every word is clear and one encounters no difficulty in grasping the importance of what he states which is one of the many positive aspects of this significant work.

It is an emotional rollercoaster that takes you through very harsh yet subtle instances of loneliness, a search of identity, alienation, friendship, love, loss and, heartache. Read more.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is a 1985 surrealistic science fiction novel by Haruki Murakami which is set in two fictional universes – Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World. The amusing aspect of the novel is that none of the characters are named especially but are referred to certainly by their professions, characteristics and cheeky nicknames.

It is no surprise that Murakami builds up a very unbelievably strange universe with all sorts of mystic elements and crazy twists and turns yet he intrigues you with his lucid, simple and fast-paced first-person narrative, dragging you into this weird tale of emotions.

Overall, a strong fast-paced work by Murakami that blows you away with its spiritual, mystic and bewildering climax.

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1984 by George Orwell

‘1984’ is a dystopian political fiction novel published and written by George Orwell in the year 1949, which garnered universal acclaim. The novel is not only dystopian, it is also an accurate and depressive portrayal of what a nightmare Utopia can be, because there can never be a Utopia without bloodshed, and ignorance of human faculties, a perfect world is denounced by Orwell as the bleakest of the worlds.

The novel strongly showcases the reality of totalitarian and authoritarian governments, and how many layers are constructed to give an illusory sense of the word to the proletarians, the bourgeoisie, aristocracy, and the vast disparity between the inner party leaders and the rest of the unfortunate ones. Read more

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Road is a 2006 apocalypse novel written by Cormac McCarthy which is recognised as one of his many masterpieces of American literature which garnered him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007 and James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 2006.

The novel is a haunting story of an unnamed father and son who travel across the vast wasteland void of humanity, to live and survive one day at a time, nothing to look forward to and nothing to live for.

The Road is simultaneously a study of morality, character, human depravity and struggle of light and darkness, God and Demon as the marauders go through the roads, and dark houses with cannibals storing humans to eat them up.

Read full review https://bit.ly/2UKHxM5

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

‘The Line of Beauty’ is a novel of philosophical, subliminal depth and beauty that has sacred prose with a poetic voice rarely heard or written, it has a harmony that doesn’t only satiate the intellect, but touches the reader’s soul in a way many other novels haven’t.

Hollinghurst is a writer of keen observation and subtle commentary on the buzzing aristocratic life in London, which was even beautifully written in The Swimming Pool Library, but a notch higher in this piece of work.

‘The Line of Beauty’ is a novel to die for and a symphonic achievement that showcases delicate artistic taste and sense.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

‘Brave New World, a novel published in 1931, is an understated novel that contains between its covers, some of the most important messages to liberate humanity out of the clutches of wilful slavery.

The novel represents a continuous struggle between happiness and the necessary evil, sedated minds don’t constitute a utopia, minds which don’t appreciate literature, philosophy, and art, mechanized brains designed to receive inundated amounts of pleasure and intoxication, in the guise of the most desirable word ‘happiness’.

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The Swimming Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst

'The Swimming Pool Library’ is a novel that amazes the reader with its unique outlook for delicate and deep psychological insights, it turns out to be surprising and in the end, very moving.

‘The Swimming Pool Library’ is an amazing title choice for the novel, it is poetic, lyrical, breezy, casually charming and wonderfully metaphorical, hinting at the flowing sexual escapades of characters, and especially the coming of age of William Beckwith, as he realises and awakens to the fact when he is planning his book, that Charles’ diary is not only a beautiful evidence of personal struggle but it is a haunting portrait of homosexual life in the world.

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‘Money: A Suicide Note’ by Martin Amis

Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis is surely a benefactor of time, it has been one of the most well reviewed and well-written novels to come out of contemporary British literature, notwithstanding the lack of nomination for a Booker Prize. Money: A Suicide Note, it is a perfect title and the novel epitomises the title, in all its varieties and connotations. Some readers might be overwhelmed by the continuous rant, but it has to be there, the over surging multitudes of people, money, and debauchery to sicken and deviate from the conventional standards.

Money: A Suicide Note, is a novel, which rejects the conventional boundaries of literariness, and strives to become something more iconoclastic, reinventing literature to bring it to the modern epoch. A hilariously bone tickling masterpiece, that is morbid, embarrassing, occasionally disgusting but nonetheless, leaves the reader nothing short of, astonished and amazed.

Read review: https://bit.ly/33Q9XVB

An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro

An Artist of the Floating World, has the dream-like taste of an Haiku or Hay(na)ku. It is the most reticent of Ishiguro’s novels, a sense of calmness hovers over his scenic imagination, character depth, and the spoken word. An Artist of the Floating World, is not, in the end as intoxicatingly heartbreaking as The Remains of The Day, or as emotionally disturbing as Never Let Me Go. Yet, An Artist of The Floating World is a novel which has beauty and regret percolating across all its pages, and paints an absolutely unforgettable dream-like landscape.

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One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a novel written by Gabriel García Márquez, published in the year 1967. It is one of the greatest progenitors of the modern magical realism, set in the fictional city of Macondo, tracing the lifeline of the generations of the Buendía family. The novel is perhaps the most significant work in the magical realism literary canon, and is embellished with a simple and musical prose, wrought with striking images, metaphors, symbols and allegories. The narrative is glazed with perhaps hundreds of swiftly moving anecdotes, passing in small spasms through the fleeting air, inducing a dream-like quality. It is very clear from the first paragraph, that Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is an original, one of his own kind. One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the finest novels ever written, which between its covers, reflects and meditates upon the whole continent of human emotions that any heart has ever known. A landmark book. 

Read reviews: https://bit.ly/2Daxgi0

My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk

My Name Is Red is a murder mystery and philosophical art novel written by Nobel Prize winning writer Orhan Pamuk. My Name Is Red is the one which follows a very complex plot with a very large cast of characters who belong to different backgrounds, complex and deep and symbolic, unforgettable in a sense, I would say. My Name Is Red, is in totality a novel of the tensions between the east and the west which is wondrously explored through the eyes of artists gazing at miniatures and paintings. The novel has the structure and complexity of a labyrinth, because the moment the reader experiences a thunderous shock, Pamuk sets the stage for another and another, creating prisms of reality within reality, and interweaving stories within stories, creating a web of history, politics, social culture, romance and sexual intrigue. My Name Is Red is a beguiling portrait of art and the landscape of the east, which delights and haunts the reader in numerous guises of its marvellous characters.
Read full reviews: https://bit.ly/32KbVGw

The Enigma of Arrival by Sir V.S. Naipaul

The Enigma of Arrival by Sir V.S. Naipaul is a novel in five sections published in 1987 based on real life events of the writer during his time in Wiltshire and his recollections of the past, during his emigration to New York from Trinidad. This book cannot and should not be recognised as a novel, it is a piece of wonderful literature and brilliant prose writing, but to call it a novel is restricting and shallow of those who have labelled it. It is a real life work, in which Naipaul is the man inside, ensorcelling the reader with his benumbing and painful observations recorded in a prose which is extraordinary. The Enigma of Arrival is a deeply lonely and depraved book, a book which has scarcely any compassion, any colour or any reassurance. It is a solitary and dry book which brutally wounds the reader, profoundly diminishing with its lack of spring, all it has between its covers is the endless cycle of tension, loss, grief and mortality moving endlessly again and again until broken by death.

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The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

The novel "The God of Small Things" is a heartbreaking, devastating and crushing portrayal of human lives that cling to small things when big things flow against the tide, and how small things break the human heart more than the big things in life. The book expands the moral landscape of dilemmas and stands as an iconoclastic work, heroic and courageous. A superb novel which a reader can never forget because of the sheer beauty of Roy’s characters, their feelings hanging on the slate of her lyrical prose, and how they fall and break so delicately like flowers crushed and squelched beneath the footsteps of leather-boots. A fragile and dark fairy tale of emotions. A must read.
Read full reviews: https://bit.ly/321HnQk

Amongst Women by John McGahern

Amongst Women by John McGahern is a novel published in the year 1990, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and has come to be recognised as one of the great Irish novels of our time. The novel has a simple plot encompassing a small cast of characters, of which most are women. Every character is endearing, dark and compassionate, constantly ever-changing as the sudden transformations in the physical landscape. In Amongst Women, the characters laugh, smile, revel in their naughtiness amidst the dark clouds hovering above them. This is the writing that breathes life into the dying fiction, and we need more voices like them to keep the blood flowing in the veins of prose. Amongst Women is one of the few triumphs of fiction that achieves greatness through its simplicity and original human voice. It is a book of a lifetime, go read it!
Read full reviews: https://bit.ly/2U7amzU

Voss by Patrick White

Voss is difficult and formidable, yet it also proves to be one of the greatest novels of our time. I might agree that some of the colonial adventures shown in the book might seem old-fashioned to the new readers, but I would say almost every sentence of this book is calculated and purposeful. Seldom there have been writers who have such a balanced command over liminal spaces in our psychological and physical horizons of nature. The novel rides astride on two boundaries enriching the story with movement. The words move like sharp darts across the fertile landscape to the bleakest thoughts of its memorable characters until they merge to create a mind-bending portrait of new realism.
Read full reviews: https://bit.ly/2U3C14K

Review of The Corrections

In my view, I never expected that a twenty-first century writer would have possessed such a great talent for characterisations and meditations on life. Writing had become more about the language, the theme and the idea of the world rather than the shameful emotional impulses of its characters. What differentiates this novel from its ancestral roots in Tolstoy, Mann and Dostoevsky, is the fact that its greatness doesn’t lie in its length, dimension or scale but the inner workings of the characters’ psychological mechanism. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen pictures a small time period in their lives with flashes of memory similar to a collage, appreciating non-linearity over linearity of time and space which the characters inhabit. Read full reviews: https://bit.ly/2HmWeNC

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz is a tour de force which will make you laugh, smile and feel heartbroken at the way things happen to people and often happen to good people in life. The novel is superbly humorous yet devastatingly tragic; it makes the reader feel helpless, who is a spectator unable to do anything to pull out the characters from their pit of overwhelming unhappiness. Whatever happens to Oscar Wao is incredibly sad, yet the character himself is wonderfully written. The novel beautifully addresses other aspects of the first-person narration, for instance, the unreliability of the narrator. It is very difficult to differentiate between physical reality and the subjective psychological perception of it, which the characters are experiencing. https://bit.ly/2Zk29ZZ

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

Freedom is a novel published in the year 2010 by American novelist Jonathan Franzen. Freedom is an extremely progressive, innovative and contemplative novel which meditates upon the notion of liberty and the harmful nature of it, the struggles that liberty entails, and non-redemptive decisions hewn out of free will which lead human beings to both destroy themselves and their surroundings. It has a feel-and-texture of classic dystopian novels except that this is a modern realist family novel with uncountable sexual jokes and dark humour that typical Franzen fans will gush over. https://bit.ly/2z9x00V

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart is a novel by Chinua Achebe published in the year 1958 to great acclaim and since then, has been recognised as a classic of postcolonial literature. Things Fall Apart is a remarkable novel, which manages to be persuasive and intricate enough to dazzle the readers. It is also a novel which should be taught in universities and schools as an important tale of postcolonialism which, in my view, would educate the readers more than the non-fictional accounts. Chinua Achebe should be read for the sole reason that he has given voice to a whole generation of brilliant African writers and we, as readers, should forever be indebted to him. https://bit.ly/2Zcclb7

The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz

The Cairo Trilogy is a series of three novels written and published by the Nobel prize winner for literature Naguib Mahfouz, initially in the Arabic language in the years 1956-1957. The three books: Palace Walk (1956), Palace of Desire (1957) and Sugar Street (1957) were published later in English translation in the 1990s by Doubleday. This novel is a masterpiece from the beginning to the end. It is a book to cherish and live through. https://bit.ly/33Fv26k