Welcome back to Book Break! Today we are going on the trip
of a lifetime. We are going to travel the whole way around the world
just using books. And as well as traveling the globe, we're also going to
be traveling through time, through genres, it's all very exciting. So
as the Book Break headquarters is in London, that's where we're setting off
from on our journey, and for our first stop we are popping on over to Ireland.
So like I said, as well as jumping around the map we're also going to be jumping
through time, and with our first book, ,The Wonder by Emma Donahue
we will be traveling all the way back to 1859 when a nurse is summoned to look
after an eleven-year-old girl who claims to have survived without food
for months. People are starting to see her as some kind of religious
miracle, but the nurse knows that medically speaking this obviously can't
be true. She's worried that there is maybe some
trick being played, or at worst the girl might be being
abused. And this story is actually inspired by a few
real life stories of young girls who claim to be surviving without food.
So it is absolutely fascinating. Next up we're travelling to Iceland, and here
let's try a horror story, I remember you by Yrsa
Sigurdadotti. In this book a group of friends decide to
buy and renovate this dilapidated seaside house.
When they get there, they discover they are not alone, there is some other
presence in the house. Meanwhile in a nearby town
we meet a young psychiatrist whose son went missing three years
earlier, and when he is called to investigate the suicide
of an elderly woman who he and his family had never met,
he discovers that she was completely obsessed with his
missing son, and somehow all of these story lines are going to come
together and when they do it's going to be terrifying.
Next to Canada, all the way on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island,
we find a beautiful striking glass hotel surrounded by water. So of course this
book is The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel. So one night in this
amazing hotel, a beautiful bartender called Vincent
meets a rich businessman, and that is the start of their life
together. So Vincent gets sucked into this world of
money and glamour which will all dramatically come to an
end with the collapse of this international Ponzi scheme that the
businessman was involved in. But all the way back on that first night
when they met, another guest at the hotel found a threatening message
written on the glass of the window that said
"why don't you swallow broken glass" and he's really shaken by it.
We also know that 13 years after this night Vincent will go mysteriously
missing from the deck of a ship. And this book covers everything that
happens in between. Jumping through time and place, even
hinting at alternate possible realities for the
characters, it's an absolutely beautiful and mesmerizing
book that I just loved. I've got a few stops planned for
us within the US, so let's start with Hawaii,
where we're going to pick up Shark Dialogues by Kiana Davenport.
And this is about a Polynesian Hawaiian family through the generations.
And the book is partly contemporary, partly historical fiction, partly magical
realism. So in the contemporary section we meet
four cousins from this family who have all scattered to live in different
places around the globe, in China, Japan, the Philippines, but they
all come back together to visit their grandmother and hear her
story of her life. So it's the grandmother's story that
takes us on this journey through Hawaiian history, and even with elements
of Hawaiian mythology weaved in as well. For our next American stop we are
heading to Arizona for a political thriller,
Girl in the Rearview Mirror by Kelsey Rae Dinberg. So in this book, a woman
called Finn moves to Arizona and becomes the
nanny for this really high-profile political family.
The grandfather of the family is a senator, but in the summer leading up to
the senator's re-election, a woman starts following Finn claiming
that she has secrets about the family that could destroy them.
And as Finn tries to protect this family that she's working for,
she ends up getting sucked further and further into this
scandal, and risks exposing some of her own secrets from her own past.
And now let's travel all the way across the country to
New England i.e Lovecraft Country for the book
Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff. This book is about various members of a family
traveling through this part of the country that was the setting for a lot
of H.P. Lovecraft's horror fiction. But just as
in real life H.P. Lovecraft expressed some
pretty hateful racist views, the family find in the book that as well as the
supernatural beings they come across, much scarier in fact is the real life
racism that they face along the way. And the TV show is coming out this year
produced by Jordan Peele and JJ Abrams, that's really exciting. The book is this
wonderful homage to the genre that Lovecraft is so famous
for writing in. But with a complete subversion of the
racist tropes that often accompany that genre.
Next down to Mexico where we're going to read The Dead Girls by Jorge Ibargüengoitia.
This book is a satire based on a very
dark true story from the 60s about these
brothel-owning serial-killing sisters who killed at
least 90 people, mostly women but some male
customers as well, and the book is written as if it's a
police report. So it's exposing this really broken
justice system, and infusing this story that was actually obviously a really
terrible story, with a lot of dark humour, so the book is
actually this great study of human motivation and behaviour.
In Cuba we're going to read Revolution Sunday which was the author Wendy
Guerra's first book to be translated into English.
This is about a woman called Cleo from a once prominent Cuban family who travels
to Spain to collect a prestigious literary award. But when she gets there
she is greeted with suspicion, she's treated as an informant
for the Castro regime, and this suspicion actually follows her
back home to Cuba. She finds herself under constant government surveillance,
and then she meets and falls in love with a Hollywood filmmaker,
and discovers that her family are not who she thought.
Next to Brazil for My German Brother by Chico Buarque.
So this is about a teenage car thief in Brazil called Chicho
who discovers a letter hidden amongst his father's belongings,
which reveals a secret: his father once had a child with another woman,
a German woman. So Ciccio sets out on this mission to find out what happened
to his German half-brother. Did he survive the bombings in the war?
Did he actually join the Hitler youth? It becomes this life-long obsession to
discover what happened to his possibly-not-even-real German brother.
And this mission is inextricably tied up for Ciccio with his
own mission to win his father's respect. And this story is actually based on
Chico Buarque's own life; the author really did discover that
he had a German secret half-brother. Our next book is going to take us to
Chile and that is Ways of Going Home by Alejandro Zambra. This is a very
experimental book, so it starts with us witnessing an
earthquake through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy.
And the nine-year-old boy then meets an older girl from his neighbourhood
who asks him to spy on her uncle. But then
we step back from that storyline, and that whole first section becomes
a novel within a novel, and our new protagonist is the author
of that novel. So it's pretty meta and really blurs those lines between
fiction and reality. And the novel in both sections is really about
trying to make sense of an adult world. So whether that's
from the perspective of a child trying to make sense of it, or from the
perspective of even as an adult looking at your own
parents and trying to make sense of their possibly very differing political
opinions. OK next up, we've got a pretty big
journey, we're going to New Zealand, where we're going to read
Waiariki by Patricia Grace. So this is a short story collection that
was first published in 1975, and it's snapshots of Maori life written
by a Maori author. And a lot of these stories seem really
ahead of their time. So for example the first story
is about a young Maori woman called Rose, who challenges one of her neighbours
who makes a comment referring to a group of Maori people ,and Rose challenges her
on why she doesn't know their names even though she knows Rose's name and is
so friendly to her. Does she just like being able to tell people that she has a
Maori friend but doesn't actually apply that empathy to other Maori people?
So these are really stories that challenge you. Next up we're going to
Australia where we're going to read Amnesty by Aravind Adiga. So this is
about a young man called Danny who is living as an undocumented
immigrant in Australia after he was denied
refugee status when he fled from Sri Lanka. So he is now working as a cleaner
when he witnesses some key evidence in a murder. So he faces this really difficult
decision. Should he risk coming forward with what
he knows which would help the case, but then he risks exposing himself to
the police and having his undocumented status
revealed and he might end up being deported, or should he keep quiet
but then have to wrestle with the morality of that decision?
So the book follows him over the course of one day as he decides
what he's going to do. Next a great book to take us to Japan
is Breast and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami. So in this book we have our narrator
who is a 30 year old woman struggling with her identity as
neither a mother or a daughter, we have her older sister
Mikiko who is really struggling with the way
her body has changed as she aged, and particularly after giving birth, and so
has decided to have breast enhancement surgery,
and we have Mikiko's teenage daughter who is so
paralyzed with the ways that her own body has been changing through puberty
that she has just shut down and stopped speaking entirely.
And so the book weaves together these three very different
Japanese women's lives. For a South Korean book, let's look at The Vegetarian
by Han Kang. So this is about a woman who has this
terrible, gory nightmare and decides afterwards to
stop eating meat entirely, which is very unusual in Korea and is
seen as this really extreme act. And so the book follows the effect
of this decision on the people in our main character's
life, she has some pretty unpleasant characters in her life, but
much more than being about vegetarianism the book is really much more about
mental illness, and the treatment of mentally ill women
in particular. And then a very un-vegetarian title for
the next one, let's go to China to read Braised Pork
by An Yu. At the start of this book a woman called
Jiajia goes into her bathroom to find her husband dead in the bathtub
with this strange image drawn on a piece of paper next to him,
and so she sets out on this mission to uncover what this image
might mean. And it's a very strange book, very dreamlike,
it's all about Jiajia's connections with,
or detachment from, various people in her life.
Taking us to India is the book Q&A by Vikas Swarap,
which is the book that the movie Slumdog Millionaire was based on.
So just like in that movie, this book opens with our main character,
in the book called Ram, being accused of cheating on the TV game show
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? And each chapter then tells a different story
from Ram's life which explains how he knew the answer to that particular
question. The plot itself though is very different
from the movie, so it's the same format but a whole new
story to uncover. Next up to Russia, and there is just so
much classic Russian literature to choose
from, but i'm going to recommend the book The Light and the Dark by Mikhail
Shishkin. This is a story told through love
letters written between these two lovers who have been separated after the man
was sent to war, but it's a very unusual structure, we
don't get the traditional back and forth, these letters are being
written seemingly completely removed from time. The woman is writing her
letters from a different century than the man is writing his, and as the
book goes on the structure starts to make more sense.
It's this really unique experimental novel that won the most major Russian
literary award. For a Lebanese book there's B as in Beirut by Iman
Humaydan. This book is made up of four
interlocking stories about four women living in the same apartment building in
Beirut during the Lebanese civil war. So we have one woman who is determined
to emigrate with her two children, whether that is with or without her
husband, we have one woman mourning the loss of her daughter, we
have one woman who is a filmmaker who's come back to Beirut to make a film
about it, and finally we have a woman called Maha
who stays in the apartment, even as her family and her city fracture around
her. So it is a very moving novel about war and loss. And then
let's travel to Egypt where we're going to read
Vertigo by Ahmed Mourad. So in this book Ahmed is a photographer
who one night in a nightclub witnesses the death of a friend
in a fight between two business rivals, and the book then becomes this
really tense political thriller where Ahmed has to go into hiding
after getting caught up in this web of lies and cover-ups,
as the perpetrators of this crime will stop at nothing
to hide it. Traveling down to Zambia, the book The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell
is a really interesting book that spans generations and
genres. So we start by jumping all the way back to 1904
where on the banks of the Zambezi river was a colonial settlement called The Old
Drift, and one mistake made by one man on one
day in 1904 kicks off this cycle of retribution
between three different Zambian families that lasts through the generations into
present day and beyond. So this book that starts as
historical fiction ends up as futuristic sci-fi, all
telling the story of this one nation. And then for another book that takes us
back to the early 20th century, we are going to travel to South Africa with the
book Little Suns by Zakes Mda. So in this
book our main character Malangana is searching for the woman he fell in
love with 20 years before, and this love story is woven into the
true story of Hamilton Hope, a colonial magistrate who was trying to
bring the Eastern cape under the control of the British people
before he was assassinated. So this book is a reclaiming of history
as well as being a beautiful love story. And next we're traveling to
Nigeria where again there is such a wealth of beloved literature,
so I've tried to pick a book that I haven't seen quite as many people
talking about, and that is The Secret Lives of Baba
Segi's Wives by Lola Shoneyin. This is the story of a polygamous union
in present-day Nigeria from all of the different perspectives
of the women in this marriage, and their different reasons they have
for being in this marriage are all so varied and so interesting. So we really
get to hear a range of very different experiences of this family.
Then of course there's the patriarch, Baba Segi, who is
laughably ignorant about a lot of things. So the book is very entertaining,
as well as being incredibly perceptive. Then we're traveling
up to Algeria for the book Women of Algiers in Their Apartment by Assia
Djabar. So this is a collection of short stories
that was actually denounced in Algeria for containing too much
political criticism. So a very interesting book.
The stories are about the plight of Algerian women
who went straight from being oppressed by colonialism to being oppressed by
a patriarchal postcolonial regime, even one that was
celebrating liberation. And the title story literally goes in and out
of the consciousness of these different women living their lives
in Algiers. OK, coming a bit closer to home, now we are heading to
France where we're going to read a delightful book called The Rest of Their
Lives by Jean-Paul Didierlaurent. So this is a
really heartwarming book, perfect for fans of The Unlikely
Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. It's about a woman called Manelle who
works as a carer to the elderly, and a man called Ambroise who has a very
unusual job, he works in embalming. And these two characters are brought
together by a very unlikely request from Manelle's favourite
client, the 82-year-old chef Samuel. And so they end up going on this road
trip together to Switzerland, and it will just
make your heart soar. And seeing as this book already kindly drove us to
Switzerland, from there we haven't got far to go up
to Germany, where we're going to read The Trap by Melanie Raabe. This is a
thriller about a woman called Linda whose sister
was killed 12 years earlier and the murderer was never caught. But
only Linda saw his face, and now 12 years later she's just seen
his face again. He is now a news reporter. Linda is this
infamously reclusive novelist, and so she decides to set a trap.
She writes a book about a woman who is murdered and whose murderer is never
caught, and she agrees to give just one media
interview, to that reporter in Sweden. I obviously
had to choose some of that famous Swedish crime, so here let's read
The Secret Life of Mr Roos by Hakan Nesser, who has been described as the
godfather of Swedish crime. This book is set in a secluded hut in
the middle of the woods, great start. So Mr Roos pretty much hates
his life, hates his family, so when he wins some
money in the lottery he decides to buy this secluded hut and
he spends his days there alone, returning each night to his wife
who is completely oblivious. But then one day a young woman
on the run from her abusive ex stumbles across Mr Roos's secluded
hut, and their lives will forever be changed.
Sneak peek, a body is going to show up near the hut,
and Mr Roos is going to end up being the prime suspect. And finally, one
more stop before we come home, let's go to the Netherlands and read The
Ditch by Herman Koch, which is about the mayor of Amsterdam
becoming completely obsessed with the idea that his wife is having an affair.
So this is an exploration of pathological
jealousy and paranoia, which as the book goes on
we learn is almost a defense mechanism to distract
our main character from the other dark and difficult things going on in his
life. And Herman Koch is brilliant at writing
dark portrayals of human behaviour, and just like in his other very famous book
The Dinner, this book gives us an insight into the
political world of the Netherlands. And with that our grand tour is over.
From the Netherlands it's a pretty easy trip
back home for me, and I think to welcome you back to England I will pick up
something by Kate Morton, who despite being Australian herself
is very famous for her wonderful books set in English country homes.
But do leave us a comment. which countries did we miss out that you want
to hear about? Maybe we can do this again or even do a
dedicated video on any countries you particularly want to hear about books
from. And for more traveling vicariously with
Book Break I will link a playlist here of all of our videos that take you on
adventures. See you next time!