In Red Sword, Bora Chung trades surreal short fiction for a full-scale dystopian sci-fi epic. On a fog-shrouded battlefield, a slave-turned-reluctant fighter faces clones, color-coded factions, and truths that change everything she thought she knew.

Some books hit you with emotion. Others hit you with ideas. Patchwork Dolls does both sharp and without ever flinching. These stories are unsettling not because they’re impossible, but because they feel like the next step from where we are now.

Set in 1966 China, The Morgue Keeper is not a story of rebellion in the traditional sense… it's a story of survival, of sharing cigarettes and kindness when there's nothing left. I finished it wrecked, and grateful to have read it.

Messy but full of energy, The Book of Taba is a self-published debut that blends anime-style action, found family, and a soul-draining magic system. There are rough edges here, but also characters I cared about, and ideas that stuck with me. If you like reading early indie voices with ambition, this one might surprise you.

A layered, puzzle-like novel of psychological horror and buried trauma. Told through four interlocking stories and a series of eerie drawings, Strange Pictures builds dread without spectacle and leaves a lingering unease long after the final page.

A bestselling Korean novel about a small village bookstore where strangers come to rest and reset. Told in quiet, comforting chapters, Soyangri Book Kitchen explores burnout, grief, and second chances with warmth, food, books, and peace.

A quiet, dreamlike novel set in a village where the sun is vanishing from the sky. Sunbirth follows two sisters as they face grief, uncertainty, and the slow unraveling of the world around them. Emotionally grounded and subtly surreal, this is speculative fiction that lingers in feeling more than explanation.

This book isn’t about the rape. It’s about everything around it and the silence, the denial, the survival, and the systems that so often fail to hold the right people accountable.

An intimate, poetic reflection on motherhood, language, and identity. Gillian Sze captures early parenthood with rare grace and emotional clarity.

Jinwoo Park’s debut novel Oxford Soju Club might look like a spy story on the surface, but it’s really a quiet and sharp novel about identity, performance, and fractured belonging in the Korean diaspora.

A quiet, flexible book club focused on Asian literature — short novels, thoughtful conversations, and spoiler-free discussion at your own pace.

A lyrical, haunting novel about art, trauma, and intimacy — We Do Not Part is our July read for the My Asian Era Book Club. Join us as we slow down with this 272-page novel from the Nobel Prize–winning author Han Kang.