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.

A man wakes from a coma to find his wife dead, his body mostly paralyzed. This one is quiet horror, the kind that doesn’t scream but settles in and stays.

A quiet and deliberate novel that explores grief, suicide, and creative purpose through two intersecting lives, a sculptor and an architect, each reckoning with personal loss and the slow gravity of memory. This is a book that doesn’t offer resolution, but instead asks you to sit in the discomfort. I found it powerful, even when the tone stayed distant.

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.

A speculative novel told in disjointed vignettes, Under the Eye of the Big Bird explores extinction, artificial life, and the slow unraveling of humanity. Detached by design, this is a book that raises big questions about intimacy, survival, and what remains when connection disappears.

A quiet, slightly offbeat novel about burnout, books, and the strange comfort of working the night shift in a library that only houses the works of the dead. If you liked Morisaki Bookshop or Nakano Thrift Shop, this one belongs on your radar.

A quiet, haunting novel that unfolds in layers — snow, silence, and a history that still trembles underfoot.

What struck me most was how physical the reading experience felt. You don’t just think about these pieces. You feel them.

He felt himself floating far out at sea, deep down in the silence, alone. He was conscious only of the sea, and of himself in the sea.

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

A quiet, emotionally layered novel about love, missed connection, and the slow ache of wrong timing. Graceful and unresolved in all the right ways.

A soft, surreal novella about memory, care, and emotional quiet. Marigold Mind Laundry doesn’t ask you to understand — just to sit with it.

A delicate, devastating novel of loneliness and unspoken pain. Read my spoiler-free review of Violets by Kyung-Sook Shin, quiet, poetic, unforgettable.

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.