My latest book haul has arrived. If the photo is a bit blurry, it is because I was very excited about these books.

Quite a few of them are books that I pencilled in for my Around the World reading project, but I am looking forward to all of them.

The Chianti Flask is one of one of the latest re-prints by the British Library. I first encountered Marie Belloc-Lowndes when reading her story The Lodger (my notes on the book here) because I heard of it in a bookish Halloween Bingo game a few years ago. I have been looking forward to reading more by her ever since.

At Night All Blood is Black recently won the Booker Prize but had caught my attention before that. I enjoy reading different takes on WWI, and Diop writing a story about a Senegalese soldier taking part in the war was just too interesting to pass on.

Dreamers of the Day is a historical fiction novel about “creation of the modern Middle East at the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference, where Winston Churchill, T. E. Lawrence, and Lady Gertrude Bell met to decide the fate of the Arab world” (excerpted from the summary on Goodreads). I absolutely adored Russell’s The Sparrow and Children of God, both of which I would count amongst my favourite books now, so I wanted to check out what else the author had written. As it turns out, it seems to be mostly historical fiction. I often have a problem with that genre – for various reasons that probably deserve their own blog post – but I think I can trust Russell to deliver even for this picky reader. She’s a fantastic writer.

The two books by Ocean Vuong and Elif Shafak are books for the Around the World reading project. I know nothing about them, which is great because I can go into them with no expectations whatsoever. I love this. It’s probably my favourite way to approach new books. I haven’t even read the blurbs.

Der Reisende (The Passenger) by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz recently popped up in a list of recommendations form Daunt Books. I had never heard of the book or the author but books written about the inter-war period are my jam, especially when they were written by authors who experienced them. Here’s an excerpt form the Goodreads summary:

“Twenty-three-year-old Ulrich Boschwitz wrote The Passenger at breakneck speed in 1938, fresh in the wake of the Kristallnacht pogroms, and his prose flies at the same pace. Taut, immediate, infused with acerbic Kafkaesque humor, The Passenger is an indelible portrait of a man and a society careening out of control.”

I have high hopes for this one.

Lastly, Daughter of Persia by Sattareh Farman Farmaian is also a book I picked for the Around the World reading project. I had not heard of either the book or the author but a fellow bookish blogger, author Sharon E. Cathcart, mentioned the book as one of the sources of inspiration for her own writing (link to Sharon’s blog post), and she made the Farmaian’s book sound like something I should have read ages ago. So here we are. I’ll probably start this one very soon. (Btw, Sharon’s own story His Beloved Infidel is a charming very heart-warming way to while away an afternoon if one is in the mood for a love story.)

And that’s it.

Have you read any of these? Have you indulged in any book hauls of your own?