This month we're reading fiction translated from: Korean, Japanese and Polish.
Roadkill
Amil, translated from Korean by Archana Madhavan
In a near future where women are an endangered minority, two young friends try to break free from a facility designed for those few who can still give birth. Every year in a secluded seaside village, a maiden is sacrificed to a divine sea serpent. In a daring thriller about a woman's fragmentation of her self, a writer in an abusive marriage becomes obsessed with a mysterious woman in a purple dress. The last female shaman of an indigenous tribe tells her stories to a visiting research team. And in South Korea's Alps Grand Park, the residents exist in an exclusive world dominated by giant air purifier towers as others are left to live in the shade.
The women in these stories find themselves trapped – by circumstance, society or tradition – as they fight for a means of escape. This sweeping and subversive collection celebrates their strength and their courage, their desire for independence and self-expression.
Bookstore Girls
Kei Aono, translated from Japanese by Haydn Trowell
Riko Nishioka is assistant manager of the flagship Pegasus bookstore in Kichijoji. After working her way up from a part-time position, she is now, aged forty, a respected figure in the Japanese publishing industry. But she has a nemesis.
Aki Kitamura, twenty-seven, has waltzed in as a full-time employee thanks to her family connections. A free spirit with a rebellious streak and a silver spoon in her mouth, she's anything but a team player.
The two are always clashing – both at work and over their personal lives. But when Riko is given notice that the store will be closing in six months' time, they face a stark choice. Can they put their petty enmities aside to boost sales and save their livelihoods or will they go down fighting ... each other?
Dinner at the Night Library
Hika Harada, translated from Japanese by Philip Gabriel
All Otaha Higuchi wants to do is work with books. However, the exhausting nature of her work at a chain bookstore, combined with her paltry salary and irritating manager quickly bring reality crashing down around her. She is on the verge of quitting when she receives a message from somebody calling themselves ‘Seven Rainbows’, inviting her to apply for a job at a library with no name, a place referred to simply as ‘The Night Library’.
After successfully passing the interview, Otaha arrives at The Night Library and for the very first time she feels she has found her place in the world. As well as a treasure trove of books, the library houses a group of likeminded literary misfits, including a legendary chef who prepares incredible meals for the library’s employees at the end of each day.
But when the library’s mysterious owner decides to temporarily close the library, Otaha and her friends fear that it may not reopen and that the peace they have found there will forever be lost to them. Is their friendship and their faith in the value of books strong enough to save it? And what will remain if it isn’t?
The Crustacean
Jang Jinyeong, translated from Korean by Chi-Young Kim
Chichirim is a plain 13-year-old girl. An ordinary, misunderstood, lonely seventh-grader. A girl with a terrible secret. Her dad is worse than useless. And her mum spends all her days tattooing thick ugly eyebrows on old women. Her parents forget her birthday and her sister hates them so much she wishes they were dead. Chichirim does bad things at school. And still, no one cares.
Until, one day, an older man picks her up on the side of the road.
He tells her she is pretty.
Her tells her what to do.
Underneath her hard outer shell, her softness is being exploited and destroyed by the people she trusts and loves the most. The Crustacean is an intricately-crafted novel exploring memory, exploitation, and the lasting effects of adult abuse and betrayal for readers of My Dark Vanessa and Tampa.
Swallows
Natsuo Kirino, translated from Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda
Twenty-nine-year-old Riki is sick of her dead-end job, of struggling to get by ever since she moved to Tokyo from the country. So when someone offers her the chance to become a surrogate in return for a life-changing amount of money, it's hard to turn down. But how much of herself will she be forced to give away?
Retired ballet star Motoi and his wife, Yuko, have spent years trying to conceive. As Yuko begins to make peace with her childlessness, Motoi grows increasingly desperate for a child to whom he can pass on his elite genes. Their last resort is surrogacy; a business transaction, plain and simple.
But as they try to exert ever more control over Riki, their contract with her starts to slip through their fingers.
Read our staff review here.
Break Room
Miye Lee, translated from Korean by Sandy Joosun Lee
Eight unsuspecting people receive an invitation to participate in a mysterious new reality show called Break Room. But what starts as an opportunity to find fame is quickly revealed to be something far more unsettling when they learn how they were chosen – they were voted in by their own co-workers as the people they'd least like to share a break room with.
But there's another twist. Among them is an imposter – a mole planted by the show's producers and the only way to win the prize money is to uncover the saboteur before time runs out.
Labelled as 'villains', the participants are left to grapple with the incredibly alarming realisation that their actions might be perceived differently by others and one moment of kindness might see them branded as the office creep. As alliances shift and paranoia festers, each contestant comes to realise surviving the show isn't the greatest challenge, it's facing up to who they are.
Diary of a Cat
Mayumi Nagano, translated from Japanese by Yui Kajita
Meet Chimaki and Norimaki – two young cats lost in the sprawling metropolis of Tokyo, sniffing out cat-lovers who might be kind enough give them a ride or place to sleep for the night. Until they find a new home with the Horai family, an eccentric assortment of artists, dreamers and caterers who have one thing in common: their love of good food.
Inspired by the bougie magazine column written by Madam Horai, Chimaki decides to keep his own diary, inviting us to in share the family's meals and activities, his younger brother's comical scrapes, and the movements of a mysterious stranger around the house. His journal follows the change of the seasons from early spring to midwinter, with each entry featuring all kinds of delectable dishes and a wealth of Japanese culinary lore.
House of Day, House of Night
Olga Tokarczuk, translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
A woman settles in a remote Polish village. It has few inhabitants, now, but it teems with the stories of its living and its dead. There's the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers that he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet. There's the man whose death – with one leg on the Polish side, one on the Czech – was an international incident. And there are the Germans who still haunt a region that not long ago they called their own. From the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, these shards piece together not only a history but a cosmology.
Another brilliant 'constellation novel' in the mode of her International Booker Prize-winning Flights, House of Day, House of Night reminds us that the story of any place, no matter how humble, is boundless.
Read our staff review here.
