May 18–24, 2026
Love that consumes. Ambition that devours. Revenge that won’t let go. Five novels driven by characters who can’t stop — even when they know they should.
A single murder in 1970s Osaka ripples across twenty years, consuming two children with opposite obsessions — one chasing ruthless success, the other haunting the shadows. Higashino maps how violence breeds violence, how ambition and guilt become indistinguishable, each consequence spawning the next in an inexorable chain.
A strangled husband in the Tokyo suburbs sets four graveyard-shift factory workers on an unstoppable path — Kirino traces how one act of violence becomes a shared obsession that binds them together even as it destroys them.
by Han Kang
A sister dead in infancy, a war-flattened city, the blank page itself — Han Kang circles absence through white things until loss becomes its own strange brightness. Obsession here wears the patient face of grief refusing to look away.
by Yan Geling
A woman receives anonymous emails that strip away her carefully constructed American life — each message a small violation, impossible to ignore. Yan Geling transforms the thriller into an anatomy of obsession, where the hunt for the sender becomes indistinguishable from the unraveling of everything she thought she knew.
A student's obsessive pursuit of a mysterious classmate unravels a curse that kills indiscriminately — Ayatsuji's horror turns on the terrible logic that some mysteries demand answers, no matter the cost.