Monday Mailbox: Posting after so long

Mailbox Monday is a gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their house last week and explore great book blogs. Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists. It has finally found a permanent  home at Mailbox Monday with the following new administrators:

Leslie of Under My Apple Tree
Serena of Savvy Verse & Wit
Vicki of I'd Rather Be at the Beach

I have received a lot of books but haven't done a mailbox post for so long. I am posting only the print copies I received in the past two weeks or so. 

I received the following in my mailbox, thanks to publicists/Authors:

 Hello, My Love! (Book 1) by E Journey:

Beyond broad shoulders and heaving bosoms.

This thoughtful woman’s romance novel explores the inner life (thoughts, hopes, and doubts) of a couple as they contend with the realities of compelling relationships.

A modern-day pastiche of Jane Austen novels. Elise is a bright, beautiful law student, focused on a career and distrustful of men. She butts heads with Greg at her parents’ dinner parties. Dark, good-looking, internet-business owner, he finds Elise intriguing, so unlike the dark-haired seductive beauties he used to escort around. 

Specter of revenge. Unable to deny their attraction for each other, they spend an unexpected night together two days before he is to wed someone else. Lori, the jilted fiancée, exacts revenge, tearing Greg and Elise apart and forcing them to face who they are and what they really want.

An accident. Older and wiser, Greg and Else reunite two years later. He is in for a surprise. Later, their lives are thrown again into disarray when Elise becomes the victim of a hit-and-run. Is Lori back to haunt them again?

A delicious romance with a literary slant, spiced with a twist of whodunit.

Hello, Agnieszka! (Book 2) by E Journey:

A raw tale of early love, rivalry and betrayal. Her oldest son’s suicide attempt shocks the Halversons and forces Agnieszka to reveal a past she has kept from her children. 

Passion for music. Hearing her talented, irrepressible grandaunt Jola, a concert pianist in Poland, give a piano recital, young Agnieszka discovers a passion for music. Jola hones her talent and feeds her dreams.

Shattered dreams. Real-world problems, thorny relations with a mother tied to her roots and betrayal by Jola shatter her dreams.

A 70s love story. Agnieszka falls in love, but fate deals her first love a death blow. She rises from the losses she has suffered and gets a second chance at happiness.

A mother’s youthful dreams thwarted and renewed, amidst the exciting promise of the 70s.

 Welcome, Reluctant Stranger! (Book 3) by E Journey:

Frantic flight, peaceful life. Act of treason on an island country. Cauldron of warring emotions. Exotic beauty, ace with a gun. Hunk with gifts for mockery and cooking.

Nine-year-old Leilani and her family mysteriously flee the island country of Costa Mora, leaving her father. Years later, her peaceful solitary life in California ends when she rescues Justin Halverson from thugs and she learns a devastating truth about her father. As she agonizes over her father, Justin comforts her, and they’re drawn closer together.

With Justin, she returns to her birthplace to get her father quietly out. There, she reconnects with her past, but can she forgive her father and accept him for who he is? Can she finally be at peace with who she is? Welcome, Reluctant Stranger interweaves a love story into a tale of past political intrigue and Leilani’s inner journey, accepting her past.    

About the author:

​E Journey is a realist who thinks she has little imagination. Credit that to her training (Ph. D., University of Illinois) and work in mental health, writing for academics and bureaucrats, and critiquing the work of others. She’s been striving ever since to think and write like normal people.

She’s a well-traveled flâneuse—a female observer-wanderer—who watches, observes, listens. And writes. A sucker for happy endings, she finds enough that depresses her about real life, but seeks no catharsis by writing about it. For her, writing is escape, entertainment. She doesn’t strive to enlighten. Not deliberately. But the bias of her old profession does carry over into her writing. So, instead of broad shoulders and heaving bosoms, she goes into protagonists' thoughts, emotions, inner conflicts, insecurities, and struggles to reach balance and grow.

The Arithmetic of Breasts and Other stories’ by Rochelle Potkar:

A cluster of 7½ literary short stories presenting the romantic-sexual facets of: Narain who lusts for Munika, Old Jaganlal who wants a favour from young Dia, Jackie who is in love with Nic, a surgeon who is changing more than a patient s hairline, nose, lip, and chin, Shonali and Neel who are realizing that infidelity might not be such an easy thing, a woman who walks the tight rope between tradition and sexual exploitation, and Sunil who meets the woman of his desires through an adult dating site. Through these stories, Rochelle Potkar explores the intensely personal unrelationship that exists alongside its conventional and socially articulate twin, the relationship.

Brutal by Uday Satapathy:

Brutal is the debut novel of Uday Satpathy. Two ace journalists—Prakash and Seema stir up a hornet's nest as they chase the story of a schoolteacher who murders 11 of his students. Their pursuit of the truth takes them to the ominous forests of Bandhavgarh where an eerily similar incident had occurred 8 years ago. One by one, their leads end up dead and they soon realise that they're pitted against forces more evil and powerful than they could have ever imagined.

Wet Silence: Poems about Hindu Widows by Sweta Srivastava Vikram

Wet Silence bears moving accounts of Hindu widows in India. The book raises concern about the treatment of widowed women by society; lends their stories a voice; shares their unheard tales about marriage; reveals the heavy hand of patriarchy; and, addresses the lack of companionship and sensuality in their lives. It’s a collection of poems that covers a myriad of subjects centered on social evils such as misogyny, infidelity, gender inequality, and celibacy amongst other things. The poems in the collection are bold, unapologetic, and visceral. The collection will haunt you.