Japanese, Chinese, Korean & Other Literature Books

The power dynamics of the office are never more obvious than when it comes to food: mandatory lunches with the boss, the colleague who tries to curry favour with home-baked goods, discovering the discarded remnants of someone else's late-night binge . . ...

A counter-prophet attempts the impossible to prove his power; a girl sees the hideous fate of her sister and father in a mirror bought from a gypsy; the death of a prostitute causes an unanticipated uprising; and the lives of every ordinary person since...

Winner of the inaugural Novel Prize, an elegant and subtle exploration of the mysteries of our relationships to others. A mother and daughter travel from abroad to meet in Tokyo: they walk along the canals through the autumn evenings, escape the typhoon...

The Honjin Murders is an engrossing piece of classic crime fiction from Seishi Yokomizo, the Japanese rival to Agatha Christie. The village of Okamura prepares for the wedding celebrations of the son of one its leading families, but then a masked man, a...

Flights, a novel about travel in the twenty-first century and human anatomy, is Olga Tokarczuk’s most ambitious to date. It interweaves travel narratives and reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death,...

A philosophical novel described by fellow existentialist Sartre as 'perhaps the most beautiful and the least understood' of his novels, Albert Camus' The Fall is translated by Robin Buss in Penguin Modern Classics.Jean-Baptiste Clamence is a soul in...

A haunting, bizarre short story collection about violence, mental illness, and the warped contradictions of the twentieth-century female experience.  A close friend and protégé of Marguerite Duras, Barbara Molinard (1921–1986)...

(Available after December 30th, 2022)For the first time in English, literary icon Marguerite Duras's foundational masterpiece about a young woman's existential breakdown in the deceptively peaceful French countryside.The Easy Life is the story of...

A woman finds herself filling a pit in the forest in the middle of the night; a family lock each other in their bedrooms to battle a strange plague; a wizard punishes two beautiful ballerinas by turning them into one hugely fat circus performer; a...

(Available after April 30th, 2023)Originally published in 1945, this book of poetic prose encapsulates former journalist Elizabeth Smart’s relationship with poet George Barker. Instantly, upon picking up a book of his poetry while browsing through a...

FINALIST for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. A BEST BOOK OF 2022 - Oprah Daily・TIME Magazine・Washington Post・Publishers Weekly・Lit Hub. Bestselling author of Breasts and Eggs Mieko Kawakami invites readers...

In the wake of the Great Blackout, faced with the near-extinction of humanity, a pair of lovers speak to each other. They parse, with precision, with familiarity, the endless aspects of their love. Out of their dialogues, piece by piece, a composite...

'That summer we bought big straw hats. Maria's had cherries around the rim, Infanta's had forget-me-nots, and mine had poppies as red as fire.'Three Summers is a warm and tender tale of three sisters growing up in the countryside near Athens before the...

From the author of the International Booker Prize-winning Time Shelter comes another mind-expanding adventure in the realms of memory, empathy and the history we can't escape, as the unnamed narrator tries to live with a pathological condition that...

A seductive, disorienting novel that manipulates the fragile line between dreams and reality, by South Korea's leading contemporary writer   A startling and boundary-pushing novel , Untold Night and Day tells the story of a young woman's journey through...

Tsukiko is in her late 30s and living alone when one night she happens to meet one of her former high school teachers, 'Sensei', in a bar. He is at least thirty years her senior, retired and, she presumes, a widower. After this initial encounter, the...

A piercing and passionate novel, set in rural Argentina, about violence and masculinityOscar Tamai and Elvio Miranda, the patriarchs of two families of brickmakers, have for years nursed a mutual hatred, but their teenage sons, Pájaro and Ángelito,...

Winner of a PEN/Heim Grant.Cursed Bunny is a genre-defying collection of short stories by Korean author Bora Chung.Blurring the lines between magical realism, horror, and science-fiction, Chung uses elements of the fantastic and surreal to address the...

A hugely enjoyable, page-turning classic Japanese mystery with an ingenious conclusion from the author of The Decagon House Murders, translated into English for the first timeDon’t miss this beautifully constructed, highly entertaining and atmospheric...

The Osugi family have come to a realisation. Each of them hails from a different planet. Father from Mars, mother from Jupiter, son from Mercury and daughter from Venus. Already seen as oddballs in their small Japanese town in the 1960s, this...