Fiction

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Please Form Pairs

Please Form Pairs

In a world where popularity determines survival, Mishin Mizushima is a teenage girl who struggles to meet Japan’s unforgiving standards of beauty and social status. Unpopular at school and abandoned emotionally by her mother, she occupies the lowest rung of a ruthless social hierarchy dominated by glamorous, powerful girls. But when a new teacher introduces a seemingly simple instruction—students must form pairs, and no two people can pair together twice—the established order begins to collapse. Those left without partners face a terrifying consequence: execution. Blending the vicious social politics of Mean Girls with the deadly competition of Squid Game, Chiren Kina’s dark, candy-coloured thriller explores bullying, conformity, beauty standards, and the desperate human need to belong. Beneath its exaggerated, unsettling premise lies a sharp examination of how easily social exclusion can become a matter of life and death.

Archipelago of the Sun

Archipelago of the Sun

In the concluding volume of Yoko Tawada’s imaginative Scattered All Over the Earth trilogy, Hiruko continues her search for her lost homeland, a country that seems to have disappeared from maps and from collective memory. Travelling aboard a mail boat across the Baltic Sea, she is accompanied by an unusual group of companions: Knut, a Danish linguist; Akash, an Indian man exploring gender identity; Nanook, a Greenlander and former sushi chef; Nora, a German museum worker concerned with social justice and the environment; and Susanoo, a mysterious Japanese cook. As the voyage unfolds, unexpected passengers—including figures from literature and mythology—complicate their journey and challenge their understanding of history, nationality and belonging. Blending surrealism, humour and philosophical speculation, Tawada explores how language shapes identity and how people build connections across cultural boundaries. The novel ultimately imagines belonging not as a fixed geographical inheritance, but as something that can emerge through dialogue, storytelling and shared experience.

This is Where the Serpent Lives

This is Where the Serpent Lives

Daniyal Mueenuddin

Spanning six decades, This Is Where the Serpent Lives is an expansive portrait of contemporary Pakistan, where wealth, privilege and inherited social hierarchies shape the destinies of generations. At its centre is Yazid, an orphan who rises from poverty on the streets of Rawalpindi to become a trusted chauffeur in the household of a powerful landowning family. Around him, the lives of aristocrats, servants, ambitious farmers and young lovers intersect across Pakistan’s chaotic cities and feudal countryside. Saqib, the son of a poor gardener, receives an opportunity to manage a new agricultural enterprise, but his determination to improve his position leads him into dangerous territory. Meanwhile, rivalries, romantic entanglements and political corruption threaten the fragile order maintained by the wealthy elite. Through a richly interconnected cast of characters, Mueenuddin examines the price of ambition and the ways class, money and power perpetuate inequality. The novel offers an intimate, unsparing view of a society caught between changing aspirations and deeply entrenched traditions.

Repetition

As winter settles over Norway, a chance encounter prompts a woman to revisit the events of her sixteenth year. At the time, she was navigating the familiar upheavals of adolescence: first experiences of alcohol and sex, growing independence, and the uneasy distance between herself and her parents. Her mother watched her anxiously, while her father remained emotionally remote. Yet beneath these ordinary teenage experiences lay something more disturbing, an event that reshaped the family and led to a silence that endured for decades. Looking back as an adult, the narrator struggles to understand what happened and how her family’s response influenced her sense of self. With psychological precision and an unflinching examination of memory, Hjorth explores the lasting power of childhood experiences, the stories families suppress, and the difficulty of recovering a past that may never be fully understood.

At Sea

Y.M. Abdel-Magied

Zainab is an expert driller accustomed to working in an industry where women must constantly prove their competence. When she is offered the opportunity to oversee a high-stakes offshore oil rig operation, she leaves behind her pregnant sister and heads out to sea, determined to demonstrate that she has earned her place at the top. But the assignment quickly becomes a test of both her professional abilities and her moral convictions. She is the only woman among a crew of hardened men who resent her authority, and the rig itself is teetering on the edge of disaster. As Zainab investigates the technical problems threatening the operation, she discovers that the danger extends beyond the machinery. Corporate greed, careless decision-making, and the crew’s determination to complete the job as cheaply and quickly as possible threaten everyone’s lives. With her warnings repeatedly dismissed, she must decide how far she is willing to go to prevent a catastrophe. Drawing on the author’s own experience as a drilling engineer, this gripping literary thriller explores sexism, ambition, environmental responsibility, and the human cost of unchecked capitalism. Against the vast and unpredictable power of the ocean, Zainab confronts a world in which professional authority and ethical responsibility are constantly at odds. The novel asks what it means to stand by one’s principles when the people in power refuse to listen.

Paradiso 17

Hannah Lillith Assadi

Born in Palestine on the eve of the 1948 Nakba, five-year-old Sufien is forced to leave his family’s ancestral home, beginning a lifelong journey shaped by displacement and the search for belonging. From a refugee camp in Syria to the oil-rich deserts of Kuwait, the university streets of Florence, and the crowded neighbourhoods of New York, Sufien moves between countries and cultures, repeatedly attempting to build a home somewhere new. Yet every place offers both the promise of reinvention and the painful reminder of what he has lost. In Kuwait, he experiences first love and family estrangement. In Italy, he discovers intellectual freedom and the intoxicating possibilities of life beyond his upbringing. Later, in New York, he forms an unlikely friendship with a wealthy Jewish American man and falls in love with a Jewish woman, creating a family of his own. But even as he establishes roots in the United States, the past remains an enduring presence. Recounted from his deathbed, Sufien’s story moves between memory and reflection, tracing the complicated relationship between exile, identity, and the desire to belong. Inspired by the life of Assadi’s Palestinian father, this lyrical novel explores how displacement reverberates across generations and asks whether home is a place we can recover, a community we create, or an idea we carry within ourselves.

The Trap

Fiona Kelly McGregor

Sydney, October 1942. As the Second World War transforms the city, blackouts, curfews, thriving black markets, and an influx of American servicemen create an atmosphere of opportunity and danger. Beneath the respectable surface of wartime society, nightclubs and underground bars offer refuge to people living outside conventional social norms. Among them is Ray Sayles, a nightclub manager whose encounter in the Domain, a public park in central Sydney, brings him to the attention of the police. Detectives Thomas Carney and William Grigg are conducting a campaign against homosexual men, using entrapment in public toilets to manufacture arrests. As Ray becomes caught in their scheme, a scandal begins to expose the corruption and hypocrisy of those entrusted with upholding the law. Journalists, lawyers, and influential establishment figures become entangled in a struggle over truth, reputation, and justice. Inspired by a real historical scandal, this compelling novel brings to life Sydney’s marginalised communities during wartime. Blending crime fiction with social history, McGregor examines institutional homophobia, police corruption, and the resilience of people forced to conceal their identities to survive. At its heart, The Trap asks who gets to define morality—and what happens when the law itself becomes an instrument of persecution.

Sisters in Yellow

Sisters in Yellow

Fifteen-year-old Hana Ito lives with her young mother in a cramped Tokyo apartment, struggling with poverty and the uncertainty of a life without security. In the late 1990s, when Japan is grappling with economic stagnation, the future seems particularly bleak for those born without privilege. Then Hana meets Kimiko Yoshikawa, an older woman whose confidence and warmth offer her a glimpse of another possible life. Together, they establish Lemon, a modest bar that becomes a refuge for Hana and a place where she begins to imagine a future beyond mere survival. As the business grows, Hana forms relationships with other young women who, like her, are trying to find their footing in a world that offers them few choices. But financial desperation, dangerous acquaintances, and difficult moral compromises gradually threaten the fragile community they have built. Decades later, news of a shocking criminal case involving Kimiko forces Hana to revisit the past and confront the consequences of decisions she has spent years trying to forget. Blending crime fiction with an intimate portrait of female relationships, Kawakami explores poverty, ambition, betrayal, and the ways women struggle to protect one another in an unequal society. The novel asks how far people will go to survive—and whether the bonds formed in desperate circumstances can withstand the weight of time and guilt.

Frida Slattery As Herself

Frida Slattery As Herself

When aspiring actress Frida Slattery meets ambitious theatre director John Reddan in a Dublin pub in 2005, neither can imagine how profoundly they will shape each other’s lives. Frida is struggling to establish herself as an actress, while John is beginning to make a name for himself as a writer and director. Recognizing each other’s creative potential, they embark on an artistic partnership that brings them professional success, critical acclaim, and an increasingly complicated personal relationship. Over the next sixteen years, their intertwined lives carry them from Dublin to London, New York, and Los Angeles. As their careers evolve and their personal lives become more complicated, the boundaries between artistic collaboration, friendship, ambition, and romantic desire grow increasingly difficult to navigate. Success brings new opportunities, but also betrayal, disappointment, and heartbreak. Despite marriages, separations, and the changing circumstances of their lives, Frida and John remain connected in ways neither can fully explain. With wit and psychological insight, Ana Kinsella explores the relationship between art and identity, examining how creative partnerships can inspire us while also threatening to define us. This expansive literary novel is ultimately a story about love, ambition, artistic expression, and the difficult process of finding one’s own voice.

Saoirse

Charleen Hurtubise

In 1999, Saoirse Byrne appears to have found the life she always dreamed of. Living on Ireland’s rugged Donegal coast, she shares a peaceful home with her partner, Daithí, and their two daughters. A talented artist, she pours her love for her family and her appreciation of the surrounding landscape into her paintings. But beneath this seemingly idyllic existence lies a secret: Saoirse has been living under a stolen identity since fleeing the United States as a teenager. She has crossed an ocean to escape a traumatic childhood and the dangerous people connected to her past, determined never to return to the life she left behind. When an exhibition in Dublin brings her unexpected acclaim, the attention threatens to expose the carefully constructed identity that has allowed her to survive. As memories of her troubled upbringing and the choices she made to escape resurface, Saoirse must confront the possibility that the past she has tried to bury could destroy the family and freedom she has worked so hard to build. Moving between Ireland and the United States, this suspenseful literary novel explores trauma, reinvention, the complexities of love, and the fragile boundary between survival and deception. It asks whether it is possible to escape one’s past—or whether true freedom requires facing it at last.

The Soul Catchers

The Soul Catchers

What if, after death, you were given one final chance to remain close to the people you love? In The Soul Catchers, eleven recently deceased people encounter a mysterious, nameless spirit who offers them an unusual opportunity: they can return to the world of the living by inhabiting an object cherished by someone they left behind. A treasured mug, a mother’s hearing aid, a diary, or a playground climbing frame becomes a vessel through which the departed can continue to experience fragments of the lives they once knew. Through these intimate encounters, Naoko Higashi explores the quiet, complicated emotions that accompany love and loss. Each story offers a different perspective on the bonds that connect people across generations, even when death has made ordinary communication impossible. Blending magical realism with elements of Japanese folk beliefs about spirits and the presence of souls in everyday objects, this tender, gently humorous collection reflects on grief, memory, and the difficulty of letting go. It invites readers to reconsider the meaning of presence and suggests that love can endure in the smallest, most unexpected corners of our lives.

My Year As a Fraud

My Year As a Fraud

Johanna Swanberg

In the remote Swedish village of Bäcken, Cassi has become something of a local celebrity. As the founder of a successful self-help retreat, she offers everything from couples’ therapy to puppy yoga and full-moon rituals. Her clients trust her advice, pay generously for her services, and admire her apparent wisdom. There is just one problem: Cassi is a fraud. Behind her carefully constructed public image is a woman struggling with unemployment, depression, and alcoholism, concealing her own troubles while helping others navigate theirs. But maintaining a life built on deception becomes increasingly difficult as Cassi forms genuine connections with the people around her. When the truth threatens to emerge, she must confront the distance between the person she pretends to be and the person she really is. Blending sharp humour with tenderness and emotional depth, this novel explores loneliness, self-deception, and the universal desire to belong. It asks whether someone who has spent years hiding behind a carefully crafted identity can find the courage to be honest—and discover that acceptance is possible even without pretending to have all the answers.