May 25–31, 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.
Eighteen years stacking shelves in a Tokyo convenience store — Murata's deadpan masterpiece asks what we inherit when we refuse our family's script for who we should become, and what loneliness costs when you stop performing the right kind of brokenness.
A girl alone in Seoul, working factory nights and attending school by day, writes letters home that her parents will never fully understand — Shin's searing portrait of how survival shapes us, and what gets lost in translation between generations.
Seven teenagers find their bedroom mirrors opening onto a castle — and in that liminal space between isolation and belonging, they finally speak the truths their families never asked to hear. Tsujimura transforms a wish-granting mystery into something far more precious: a place where silence itself becomes inheritance enough.
Two parallel worlds — one a fever dream of Tokyo's underworld, the other a walled town where shadows are surrendered at the gate — slowly converge into one devastating inheritance. Murakami's most architecturally ambitious novel asks what we inherit when we inherit ourselves.
by Lee Geum-yi
A Korean woman arrives in early 1900s Hawaii bearing a photograph of a stranger she's promised to marry — only to discover the matchmaker's three lies have rewritten her entire life. Lee traces how women inherit not just family names but the resilience to survive them.