Last Book Haul of 2022 🎊

Buying books is an excellent activity if you want to either spark some extra joy in your life or fight the blues during the Christmas season. Despite my last huge book haul, I did some more damage before the end of last year, and I am here today to share the new additions to my book collections. I think that I ended 2022 with a bang because I wanted to buy all the book that you will see below for a very long time. So, let's start with my last book haul of 2022!

1. Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica (2017)

If everyone was eating human meat, would you? 

Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans — only no one calls them that. He works with numbers, consignments, processing. One day, he's given a specimen of the finest quality. He leaves her tied up in an outhouse, a problem to be disposed of late. 

But she haunts Marcos. Her trembling body, and watchful gaze, seem to understand. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost — and what might still be saved... 

2. Of Dogs and Walls by Yuko Tsushima (2018)

Two luminous, tender stories from one of Japan's greatest twentieth-century writers, showing how childhood memories, dreams and fleeting encounters shape our lives. 

3. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)

Working as an intern for a New York fashion magazine in the summer of 1953, Esther Greenwood is on the brick of her future. Yet she is also on the edge of a darkness that makes her world increasingly unreal. Esther's vision of the world shimmers and shifts: day-to-day living in the sultry city, her crazed men-friends, the hot dinner dances... 

4. Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason (2020)

Everyone tells Martha Friel she is clever and beautiful, a brilliant writer who has been loved every day of her adult life by one man, her husband Patrick. 

So why is everything broken? 

Maybe Martha is just someone who finds it harder to be alive than most people. Or maybe — as she has long believed — there is something wrong with her. 

Forced to return to her childhood home to live with her dysfunctional, bohemian parents (but without the help of her devoted, foul-mouthed sister Ingrid), Martha has one last chance to find out whether a life is ever too broken to fix — or whether, maybe, by starting over, she will get to write a better ending for herself. 

5. Family Life by Akhil Sharma (2014)

For eight-year-old Ajay Mishra and his older brother Birju, family life in Delhi in the late 1970s follows a comfortable, predictable routine: bathing on the roof, queuing for milk, playing day-long games of cricket in the street. Everything changes when their father finds a job in America — a land of carpets and elevators, swimsuits and hot water — and the Mishras, envy of their neighbourhood back home, become the latest unknowns in the vast expanse of New York. 

Life in America is extraordinary, and as snows and summers come and go the brothers adjust to their exciting new world of prosperity, girls and 24-hour TV. But then comes the hot, sultry day when everything falls apart: tragedy turns the Mishras' American dream into a living nightmare and young Ajay finds himself lost and virtually orphaned in a land that is not his own. 

6. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky (1999)

Charlie's not the biggest geek in high school, but he's by no means popular. 

Shy, introspective, intelligent, yet socially awkward, Charlie is a wallflower, standing on the threshold of his life whilst watching everyone else live theirs. As Charlie tries to navigate his way through uncharted territory — the world of first dates and mix tapes, family dramas and new friends — he realises that he can't stay on the sidelines forever. There comes a time when you have to see what life looks like from the dance floor. 

7. Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi (2018)

Ada has always been unusual. Her parents prayed her into existence, but something must have gone awry. Their troubled child begins to develop separate selves and is prone to fits of anger and grief. When Ada grows up and heads to college in America, a traumatic event crystallises the selves into something more powerful. As she fades into the background of her own mind, these "alters" — now protective, now hedonistic — take control, shifting her life in a dangerous direction. 

📚

You have just reached the end of this book haul. 🥳

What was the last book you bought in 2022?