J. M. Coetzee: BOYHOOD (4/5)

A fictional autobiography by the Nobel Prize laureate. This is the first book in the trilogy, which also includes Youth and Summertime. It is a fictional account of his experiences as a boy in Worcester and Cape Town, South Africa. A story of a boy who grew up in a family as though they were of English descent. We can glean through these accounts how it was to grow up as a boy in a racially divided South Africa.

Ismail Kadare: ELEGY FOR KOSOVO (5/5)

In 1389, a Christian coalition, the Balkan group, composed of Serbia, Albania, Rumania, and Bosnia faced the Ottoman Empire, headed by Sultan Murad, together with his two sons: Princes Yakub and Bayezid. The Balkan group was defeated greatly by the Turks. Sultan Murad and Prince Yakub, his heir, were killed by his people, and Prince Bayezid was proclaimed as the new sultan. Sultan Murad's body was brought back to Anatolia, but his blood and intestines were buried on the soil of Kosovo. Through the years, that land was continually haunted and cursed by strife and war: the Catholic Albanians versus the Orthodox Serbs, the ethnic cleansing during Milosovich rule.

This is a wonderful piece of writing from the International Man Booker winner Ismail Kadare.

Mario Vargas Llosa: WHO KILLED PALOMINO MOLERO? (5/5)

Lt. Silva and his assistant, Lituma, also the protagonist in Llosa's Death in Andes, is investigating the death of Palomino Molero, an airforce cadet in an airbase near Talara. The young man was brutally murdered, hung and impaled on a Carob tree. The plot thickens when the airforce colonel, Col. Mindreu, his daughter, Alicia, and Alicia's boyfriend, Lt. Dufo, were somehow connected with the case. Apparently, Alicia's real boyfriend was Palomino.

With Llosa's wry humor, wit, and dash of social commentary, this novel is such a treat.

Saul Bellow: THE ACTUAL (5/5)

This novel was released more than a decade ago, 1997 to be exact, but the 1976 Nobel Prize laureate was still on top of his form. This short novel is touching and at times comedic. It is about Harry Trellman, who grew up in an orphanage, but not an orphan, who looks like a Japanese and studied Chinese, but not Asian, who is enterprising, but not an entrepreneur. It is also about exile: exile by old age, emotional exile.

'A man's road back to himself is a return from his spiritual exile, for that is what a personal history amounts to - exile.'

'There is no leisure for anybody... Retirement is an illusion. Not a reward but a mantrap. The bankrupt underside of success. A shortcut to death.'

It is about feelings amassed and kept for years that there is no other recourse but to deal with it and blurt it out.

'Love objects, as psychiatry has named them, are not frequently come by or easily put aside. Distance is really a formality. The mind takes no real notice of it.'

It is so unfortunate that Bellow is not with us anymore. But even in this short work, written at the twilight of his years, we can see clearly the gift he shared with us for almost five decades.

Philip Roth: EXIT GHOST (4/5)

Nathan Zuckerman, the alter ego of Roth, returned to New York after eleven years of isolation in Berkeshire, Massachusetts. Unaware with new terrain, he has to adjust with the changing mores and politics, with old personages, and with haunting memories.

While this might be the last Zuckerman novel, it is no different to others with respect to the writing quality. In fact, some passages are so rich, so intimate, so painful.

'I stopped myself from saying "was everything that followed crushed by these few years?" because the answer was obvious by now. Everything, every last thing.'

'For most people, to say I've stayed in my childhood my whole life would mean I've stayed innocent and it's all been pretty. For you to say I stayed in my childhood my whole life means I stayed in this terrible story- life remained a terrible story. It means that I had so much pain in my youth that, one way or another, I stayed in it forever.'

John Steinbeck: THE PEARL (5/5)

It is a very powerful short novel by John Steinbeck about an Indian couple who discovered a very big pearl, known as the Pearl of the World, and the chaos it brought into their lives.

Roberto Bolano: BY NIGHT IN CHILE (4/5)

By Night in Chile recollects the musings of Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean priest who unintentionally had dealings with the top people in Chilean government during one of the convoluted periods of his country's history: General Pinochet, General Leigh, Admiral Marino, and General Mendoza.

Kazuo Ishiguro: AN ARTIST OF THE FLOATING WORLD (4.5/5)

The novel is an examination of guilt and sentiments of Japanese people after World War II, their take on democracy, and their views on the future of their country. These are captured on the vantage points of Mr. Ono, a famous painter during the war, his two daughters and their husbands, his grandson, his friends and former students.