I saw this one on Instagram when it was first coming out and figured I'd get to it eventually. Then I started chatting with the author, we were in Chicago at the same time and honestly we had the same camera roll. That's what actually bumped this debut collection up my list.

This is going to be a wild ride." That's what I told myself before I was even a full chapter into The New Seoul Park Jelly Massacre by Cho Yeeun, translated by Yewon Jung. At New Seoul Park, a stranger hands out jelly candy that promises an unbreakable bond with the people you love, and that premise alone should tell you this isn't going where it looks like it's going.

Two cousins, one year of war, told in seasons. Bora Lee Reed tells a brutal chapter of Korean history with restraint, and it loses nothing in the process.

Kim Bo-Young reimagines "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" in a quarantined Korean seaside village. Horror, yes, but also very sad on so many levels.

A novelist takes his niece on a multiday walk across the Japanese countryside in the final days before the pandemic. A slice-of-life novel about nature, patience, and love, translated by Takami Nieda. It is a gem.

The cover and the comps promise cozy. A woman seven years into depression, deciding whether she wants to be alive, is something else. My honest take on Song Yu-jeong's The Memory Bookshop, translated by Shanna Tan.

Maiko Seo's first novel in English, translated by Laurel Taylor, comes to us as Someone to Cook For. In Japan it is And So the Baton Is Passed, the million-selling Booksellers' Award winner. A book about found family, food, and a steadiness I admired more than I trusted.

Our book group pick this month. A quiet love story between two lonely adults, one that gave me more to chew on than I expected, and one that will make some readers uncomfortable.

Matthew Wong Foreman's Sunset at Lion Rock follows a Wasian boy growing up between cultures in post-Handover Hong Kong. A hard, lyrical coming-of-age that's worth the read.

Susan Choi's Flashlight starts with a father and daughter on a beach at dusk and ends up somewhere much bigger: four generations, two countries, and a history most readers have never seen this close up.

I first found this book in an Italian bookstore years before it existed in English. I tried the Italian. The fantasy vocabulary defeated me. I waited. This is that translation.

Some books you finish and immediately want to press into someone's hands. Lonely Castle in the Mirror is that kind of book.

It started in Birmingham, with three books I couldn't find and an author shelved under the wrong name. Cho Yeeun's Shift earned the chase.

People ask me for book recommendations all the time. So when I heard about a woman in Tokyo who signed up for a meet-up app specifically to recommend books to strangers, I felt an immediate connection.

A pregnant woman in a world where mothers give birth to a second self that consumes them. Tiffany Tsao's But Won't I Miss Me is feminist speculative fiction that sits beside Sayaka Murata, where the surreal is just real and the horror is in what everyone has accepted as normal.

Winter Night Rabbit Worries begins with a rabbit that may not be a rabbit. Yoo Heekyung has written a book that asks you to read the same way. Stay with the uncertainty. Because what matters most, is that you stay.

Taiwan Travelogue is now in my favorites. Full stop. It is vivid, sensory, deeply observed, and underneath all of that beauty is something far more complicated.

The Tenderness convenience store is back. Located in Mojiko, Kitakyushu, Japan, the store is open 24 hours and the door is always open to whoever needs it.

I didn't know the Chunhyang folktale before I opened this book. By the time I finished it, I understood why it has lasted centuries.