English

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Murder on the Leviathan
Boris Akunin

Paris, 1878: Eccentric antiquarian Lord Littleby and his ten servants are found murdered in Littleby’s mansion on the rue de Grenelle, and a priceless Indian shawl is missing. Police commissioner “Papa” Gauche recovers only one piece of evidence from the crime scene: a golden key shaped like a whale. Gauche soon deduces that the key is in fact a ticket of passage for the Leviathan, a gigantic steamship soon to depart Southampton on its maiden voyage to Calcutta. The murderer must be among its passengers.
If you are a fan of Agatha Christie, you must read this book!

Big breasts and wide hips
Mo Yan

Mother, a survivor, is the quintessential strong woman who risks her life to save several of her children and grandchildren.
Mo Yan, Nobel Prize in Literature 2012 has a great reputation as China’s most original, and most fiercely independent writer. Though “Big Breasts and Wide Hips” was awarded China’s most prestigious prize for fiction, it was soon banned… Mo has said: “If you like, you can skip my other novels, but you must read Big Breasts & Wide Hips. In it I wrote about history, war, politics, hunger, religion, love, and sex.” – all this, one might add, with a brilliant style.

Lewis Man
Peter May

The male Caucasian corpse – marked by several horrific stab wounds – is initially believed by its finders to be over two-thousand years old. Until they spot the Elvis tattoo on his right arm. … After the excellent #1 The Black House, it’s the Lewis Trilogy #2. – Can’t wait to read the #3: The Chessmen, published this year.

My family and other animals
Gerald Durrell

“This is the story of a five-year sojourn that I and my family made on the Greek island of Corfu. It was intended to be a nostalgic account of natural history, but I made a grave mistake by introducing my family in the first few pages…”
The book is an autobiographical account of five years in the childhood of naturalist Gerald Durrell (English naturalist and brother of author Lawrence Durrell), age 10 at the start of the saga, of his family, pets and life during a sojourn on the island of Corfu.
Seasoned with humorous events of his family members each with their eccentric habits and characteristics and peccadilloes of his queer variety of pets, this book is a real classic.

The Last Dance
Victoria Hislop

In ten short stories, Victoria Hislop takes us through the streets of Athens, into the tree-lined squares of Greek villages. This book is an easy and an entertaining summer read… Why not?

The New York Trilogy
Paul Auster

“It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking of someone he was not.”…
The New York Trilogy, consists of three postmodern brilliant variations of the classic detective story: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room; haunting and mysterious tales that move at the breathless pace of a thriller…

Small World
David Lodge

A humorous “campus novel”, sequel to Lodge’s 1975 novel, Changing Places. Recommended to fans of English literature and Academia. A quite funny picture of academic life.

Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
Henry David Thoreau

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.” (Just a small taste of this part memoir and part spiritual quest).

Human Croquet
Kate Atkinson

Isobel Fairfax is a girl growing up in Lythe a typical 1960s British suburb. But Lythe was once the heart of an Elizabethan feudal estate and home to a young English tutor named William Shakespeare, and as Isobel investigates the strange history of her family, her neighbors, and her village, she occasionally gets caught in Shakespearean time warps. Meanwhile, she gets closer to the shocking truths about her missing mother, her war-hero father, and the hidden lives of her close friends and classmates.
Part fairy tale, part mystery, part coming-of-age novel, this is a gothic novel that takes place in the 1960s!

Bliss
Katherine Mansfield

“Although Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the air and catch it again, or to stand still and laugh at – nothing – at nothing, simply.”
This small book is a “must” for this summer reading. Katherine Mansfield’s writing is pure bliss.