In a future where memories can be shared, sold, and confiscated, These Memories Do Not Belong to Us asks what it means to truly know your family and yourself. Yiming Ma’s debut is fragmented, layered, and chilling, with a stellar full-cast narration that makes each story unforgettable.

This was not the Dazai I was expecting. The familiar shadows of despair are here, but fleeting, part of the melodrama of youth rather than the heaviness of adulthood. What struck me most was how much this really felt like a teenager’s diary: messy, cocky, sometimes ridiculous, sometimes piercingly honest.

The title could just as easily have been The Rage We Pass Down. That is what I felt on every page. Rage mixed with grief, with ghosts standing in for the violence that shaped this family. The horror never felt separate from the real — it was historical and horror at the same time.

A short, unsettling novella that refuses soft edges. In Hunch Back, Saou Ichikawa gives us Shaka, a disabled woman who will not be softened into a symbol. The voice is sharp, sometimes grotesque, but always real. It left me unsettled and still thinking about body, desire, and judgment.

Natsuo Kirino’s Swallows tackles surrogacy, women’s rights, and the question of what a woman’s body is worth. A novel about power, choice, and the uneasy space between autonomy and control, it left me both frustrated and thoughtful in equal measure.

A bleak vision of Japan’s collapse where the old live on without end and the young fade before they’ve begun. Yoko Tawada’s slim novel is sad, strange, and a reminder of how political choices shape even the most private lives.

This isn’t a clean story of recovery. What Steffi Tad-y offers in Notes from the Ward are pieces of a life: ward notes, family memories, and the weight of diaspora. They do not come together into one neat picture, but they hold each other the way survival often does, loosely and urgently, without choice.

Ghost Music is a novel of loneliness, yearning, and mushrooms. Beautifully written and surreal in parts, it is a story that made me pause, underline, and ask questions instead of finding answers.

Seven powerful stories that unsettle, surprise, and remind us how much our choices matter. From Taiwan to Paris to the US, Elaine Hsieh Chou’s collection bends the ordinary into something uncanny while never losing sight of the human heart.

Winter Moon is raw and real. Joanne Yi’s All the Tomorrows After is a heart-wrenching YA novel about grief, first love, and complicated family ties. Honest, sharp, and deeply emotional.

When Athena Liu dies, June Hayward steals her manuscript and publishes it as her own. What follows is a sharp, uncomfortable satire about race, authorship, and how publishing decides who gets to tell which stories.

A light, funny rom-com with nods to BTS, meddling ajummas, and plenty of spice . Julia Song Is Undateable is the perfect serotonin spike..

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.

Sayaka Murata flips family and intimacy inside out. Vanishing World is surreal, absurd, and deeply unsettling, with social commentary that feels uncomfortably close to real life. Spoiler-free thoughts on why it works and who it’s for.

The number four is unlucky in Taiwan. Iit sounds like the word for death. For Ah-Ma, Liv Kuo’s grandmother, that superstition became a lifelong wound when her husband gave their youngest daughter away without telling her. In The Fourth Daughter, Lyn Liao Butler blends Taiwan’s hidden history, family secrets, and the comfort of food into a story about resilience, memory, and the power of never giving up.

Twenty-nine poets from the Song Dynasty, brought to life in warm, accessible translations. Study of Sorrows makes ancient Chinese poetry feel immediate, intimate, and timeless.

A lyrical debut exploring homecoming through language, memory, and identity — Nostos is a layered collection best read slowly, letting the words move through you.

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.

This was a sweet and surprisingly moving collection, funny at times, sad at others, and very much a book of the moment. Some of the poems are letters to the Mars rover, reflections on family and love, and confessions about what it means to write through grief and joy.

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.