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.

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.

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.

Project V is Park Seolyeon's feminist science fiction follow-up to A Magical Girl Retires and it is just as sharp. A robotics prodigy disguises herself as her twin brother to compete in a male-only mecha pilot competition, with an arrogant AI and a lot of unchecked egos standing in her way.

A darkly comic Korean thriller about an ajumma who discovers her years at the butcher shop have prepared her for a very different kind of work. Strange, funny, and a little more pointed than it looks.

In the heart of Seoul, in an aging electronics market the city has decided it no longer needs, two young people are learning to pay attention to each other. And the shadows have started to rise.

Kim Hyesoon named her version of Korea "Aerok" Korea spelled backwards and in doing so built an entire collection around the idea that everything runs in reverse. Lady No is one of the most important poetry collections you will read this year.

The March Fable book club pick is a shin-honkaku mystery with a Groundhog Day premise, a New Year murder, and a teenage narrator who is the only one who remembers.

A pop-up matcha event. A lucky towel. A circle that closes. Michiko Aoyama's follow-up to Hot Chocolate on Thursday is warm, layered, and just as hard to put down as the first.

A woman and a man share a house and never see each other. They ring bells. They talk through a paper wall. Kumi Kimura's COVID-era novella is bleak, precise, and completely honest about what loneliness actually asks of us.

There is a research facility called the Institute. It houses cursed objects, a ghost cat, sheep that were experimented on and can now see the future, and a never-ending tunnel that some employees find and never quite escape. Of course there is an Institute. Of course someone has to work the night shift.

A rare and vivid window into Edo-period Japan — this is not a love story, it's a life lived through appetite, and it will teach you more about desire, class, and survival than you'd expect.

Strange Buildings knocked the wind out of me. What starts as a clever, puzzle-based horror quickly turns darker and more disturbing than I expected. This is a book that doesn’t stop when you think it’s finished with you.

A quiet, thoughtful YA novel about a soul given a second chance inside the body of a boy who has died by suicide. Gentle, but not shallow, and surprisingly good at reminding you how much you don’t see in other people, or in yourself.

I went into Hunger expecting horror. I didn’t expect to finish it in tears. This is an intense, intimate love story told through grief, desperation, and a choice that refuses to let death be final.