March 23–29, 2026
What our parents gave us — and what they couldn’t. Five novels about the weight of family, the stories passed down, and the ones deliberately buried.
An elderly couple journeys through mist-laden Britain searching for their son, carrying only fragments of a shared life — Ishiguro transforms amnesia into a meditation on what we choose to remember, what we lose, and whether some family wounds are better left buried.
by Ayako Miura
A doctor's terrible secret — that he has brought his daughter's murderer's child into his home as an act of revenge — poisons everything his wife thought she inherited: her marriage, her motherhood, her right to the truth. Miura unfolds this inheritance of betrayal with surgical precision, asking what we owe those we love when love itself has been weaponized.
A high school boy inherits his grandfather's bookshop and a talking cat — together they rescue books from those who've forgotten how to love them. Natsukawa's fable about what we're left with and what we must protect treats each rescued story as a small act of grace.
by Yu Hua
A man gambles away his inheritance and spends four decades losing everyone he loves to history's cruelest turns — Yu Hua's stripped-bare prose transforms one family's devastation into an unflinching meditation on what survives when everything else is taken.
A data processor hunted through surreal Tokyo and a newcomer in a walled town where shadows are left behind — two narratives that slowly converge into one devastating meditation on what we inherit and what we're forced to abandon.