August 24–30, 2026
Books that refuse to stay in their lane. Genre-bending, expectation-defying, impossible to categorise. Five novels for readers who are bored of predictable.
A monkey steals names, a reflection rebels, a song becomes a clue — Murakami's short stories are his novels distilled to their strangest essence, each one a small door opening onto the uncanny without ever quite explaining what's on the other side.
Six stories haunted by an earthquake that never appears — Murakami maps psychological fractures onto the surreal (a giant frog, a desert stranger), proving that the most devastating tremors are the ones we feel from miles away.
A love hotel, a sleepless teenager, and a television that becomes a portal — Murakami abandons his familiar first-person voice to film Tokyo's night like a noir fever dream, where the mundane and the uncanny trade places.
Two people circling each other across a lake, building intimacy from shared meals and deliberate silences. Yoshimoto treats the unspeakable — grief, trauma, the gaps between bodies — as the very terrain where love becomes possible.
by Han Kang
A meditation on whiteness — snow, salt, silence, grief — that refuses the shape of conventional narrative. Han Kang writes in fragments, each one a small act of witnessing what remains when everything else has been stripped away.