Although it would be best to cultivate reading habits throughout the year, the summer months are perfect for immersing oneself in the literary world. Domestic publishers diligently released new, excellent titles in the categories of fiction and non-fiction throughout 2022, making it quite a challenge to select the best for the summer reading list. However, we have tried to narrow down the choices for you. Enjoy and… read.
1. The Forbidden Notebook, Alba de Céspedes, OceanMore, translated by Antonija Radić
—
—When The Forbidden Notebook was published in 1952, its third and most popular novel, de Céspedes was inscribed in golden letters in the history of Italian literature, on which the foundations of recent Italian prose will grow. Written in diary form, the novel is an intimate confession of Valeria, a wife, mother, and servant living a neat and modest bourgeois life in Rome. When she begins to write down her thoughts and feelings in a small black notebook, Valeria has no idea that it will become a diary of the disintegration of her illusions about marriage, children, and the fragile comfort of bourgeois life. Masterfully and incredibly modernly written, the female inner monologue slowly reveals the true background of romantic, maternal, and friendly relationships behind the carefully constructed facade.
2. Pachinko, Min Jin Lee, Hena, translated by Mirna Čubranić
—
—Like a fairy tale about a poor fisherman’s daughter and a handsome stranger, this epic novel begins about a Korean family, forced by circumstances to permanently settle in Japan. At the fish market in Busan in 1932, wealthy trader Koh Hansu becomes infatuated with the young and innocent Sunja, and love ignites between them. But Sunja soon discovers she is pregnant, and Hansu is married with three daughters. Disappointed, she accepts the marriage proposal of a sickly pastor with whom she soon travels to Osaka. Her departure from her native Korea, which she will never see again, will trigger a cascade of events that will resonate for decades and affect the fate of future generations. Pachinko is an award-winning historical, multi-generational saga about the Korean diaspora in Japan – the zainichi Koreans, spanning from the Japanese occupation of Korea in 1910 to the late 1980s. The captivating family narrative intertwines the harrowing fates of numerous characters, their loves and losses, ambitions and disappointments, their victories and defeats.
3. Above All, Richard Powers, Fraktura, translated by Lara Hölbling Matković
—
—Nine strangers are connected by invisible and deep roots, like the roots of a forest, through the role of trees in their lives. Their stories branch out from the family world and time, from early New York to the end of the 20th century when the Forest Wars are raging in the Pacific Northwest. Nicholas Hoel is a descendant of pioneers from Iowa, the heir to the album of the last American chestnut that his ancestors photographed every month for generations. Mimi Ma is a young businesswoman whose father sailed from Shanghai to San Francisco and planted a mulberry tree, the tree of silk on which the Ma family’s wealth was built. Douglas Pavlicek is a Vietnam veteran whose fall from a warplane was saved by a three-hundred-year-old fig tree, and Patricia Westerford is a scientist who discovered perhaps one of the last world mysteries: the conversation of trees. The four of them, along with the remaining five protagonists, fight to save the “old forest,” centered around an ancient sequoia. In this monumental novel, awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Powers delves into a theme as vast as the universe: the nature and connection of our civilization with it.
