April 6–12, 2026
Loss reshapes everything — identity, relationships, the way light falls in a room. Five novels that sit with grief honestly, without looking away.
Two women walk through grief's thresholds — one climbing mountains haunted by an ex-lover's ghost, the other keeping vigil at her sister's bedside — and discover that loss refuses neat endings. Yoshimoto's gift is making the unbearable feel oddly luminous.
by Kim Young-ha
An aging serial killer, memory slipping like sand, confronts a younger predator in his own home — Kim Young-ha's darkest gift is finding the terrible intimacy in violence, the way monstrosity can wear the face of family.
A young officer's final night before ritual suicide becomes Mishima's most shattering meditation on loyalty and love — he renders the body's last ecstasy with such unflinching precision that political conviction dissolves into pure, irreversible loss.
Two ninja clans fight to the death over Japan's future — yet what devastates most is the love blooming between their destined leaders, a romance that grieves what can never be chosen over duty.
by Han Kang
Han Kang builds her meditation on loss from fragments — white things, blank spaces, a sister dead in infancy — each one a small archaeology of what remains when everything else has been taken away.