Festive season reading recommendations: Books that should be on your reading or gift list

Gugs Mhlungu spoke to owner of Bridge Books, Griffin Shea.

Listen to their conversation in the audio clip below.

The Lost Love of Akbar Manzil, by Shubnum Khan

Synopsis

"Sana and Meena will never meet. The two women share little beyond Akbar Manzil, the sprawling mansion they call home. When Meena fell in love with the owner of the house, it was the grandest residence on South Africa’s east coast near Durban. Eight decades later when Sana and her father move to the house, the latest of Akbar Manzil's long list of tenants, it is in near-ruins, crumbling, shabby and dark. This is a place where people come to forget. Or to be forgotten.

Full of questions about her new home, Sana is drawn to the deserted east wing, home to a clutter of broken and abandoned objects – and to the locked door at its end, unopened for decades. Soon, Sana begins to discover the tangled, troubling history of the house, awakening the memories of the house itself and dredging up old and terrible secrets that will change the lives of everyone – living and dead – at Akbar Manzil.

Sublime, heart-wrenching and lyrically stunning, The Lost Love of Akbar Manzil is a haunting, a love story and a mystery, all twined beautifully into one young girl's search for belonging."

"It's really charming...I enjoy seeing Durban in that light...It's a really beautiful story."

- Griffin Shea, Owner of Bridge Books

Apeirogon by Colum McCann

Synopsis

"From the National Book Award-winning and bestselling author of Let the Great World Spin comes an epic novel rooted in the real-life friendship between two men united by loss.

Colum McCann's most ambitious work to date, Apeirogon--named for a shape with a countably infinite number of sides--is a tour de force concerning friendship, love, loss, and belonging.

Bassam Aramin is Palestinian. Rami Elhanan is Israeli. They inhabit a world of conflict that colors every aspect of their daily lives, from the roads they are allowed to drive on, to the schools their daughters, Abir and Smadar, each attend, to the checkpoints, both physical and emotional, they must negotiate.

Their worlds shift irreparably after ten-year-old Abir is killed by a rubber bullet and thirteen-year-old Smadar becomes the victim of suicide bombers. When Bassam and Rami learn of each other's stories, they recognize the loss that connects them and they attempt to use their grief as a weapon for peace.

McCann crafts Apeirogon out of a universe of fictional and nonfictional material. He crosses centuries and continents, stitching together time, art, history, nature, and politics in a tale both heartbreaking and hopeful. Musical, cinematic, muscular, delicate, and soaring, Apeirogon is a novel for our time."

"It's really a book about learning to have empathy for other people...I ended up finishing it feeling like I did not really expect to love it...It just got me feeling so reassured about humanity."

- Griffin Shea, Owner of Bridge Books

The Book of (More) Delights by Ross Gay

Synopsis

"Ross Gay’s essays have been called “exquisite” (Tracy K. Smith), “imperative” (the New York Times Book Review ), and “brilliant” (Ada Limón). Now, in this new collection of genre-defying pieces, again written over the course of a year, one of America’s most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight.

For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the “ubiquitous, nefarious” scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren.

As always, Gay revels in the natural world—sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbor’s fig tree—and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us.

For his many fans eagerly awaiting this new volume and for readers who have enjoyed the works of Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Zadie Smith, and Rebecca Solnit, Gay once again offers us “literature that feels as fluent and familiar as a chat with a close friend” (the New York Review of Books ). The Book of (More) Delights is a collection to savor and share."

"It's a wonderful book you can dip in and out of...it's a really wonderful thing to keep by and feel better about the world."  

- Griffin Shea, Owner of Bridge Books

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