Engelska

In this emblematic selection of her stories, Oh Jung-hee probes beneath the surface of seemingly quotidian lives to expose nightmarish family configurations warped by desertion, psychosis, and death. In 'Chinatown' a young girl living on the edge of the city's Chinese community comes of age among mundane violences, collisions with adult sexuality and the American occupation; in 'The Garden Party' a woman grapples with her conflicting identities of wife, mother and writer at an alcohol-fuelled gathering. Throughout a career spanning six decades, Oh Jung-hee has drawn comparisons to Alice Munro, Virginia Woolf, and Joyce Carol Oates, and is assuredly a trailblazing writer.

<b>'Joyously diabolic' </b>CAMILLA GRUDOVA<br/><b>'Dark and sumptuous and unapologetically peculiar' </b>LISA McINERNEY<br/><b>'Marvellously unnerving' </b>ERIC LaROCCA<br/><br/><i>Oddbody</i> is a collection of ten bold and unsettling short stories that confront themes of desire, fear and shame, each one asking how far the bounds of the human form can be pushed, stretched - and subverted. A woman finds herself navigating a co-dependent relationship with a ghost. A waitress gives birth to an egg during her breakfast shift. A doctor puts his patient on a cleanse to 'purify' her mind, body and soul.<br/><br/>Through playful but provocative prose, Rose Keating traverses a realm both dreamlike and nightmarish, exposing - to the bone - the absurdities and horrors of the feminine experience. <i>Oddbody </i>prods a finger at societal norms, gleefully turns familiar tropes on their head and announces Keating as an audacious new voice in Irish fiction.

<strong>A haunting exploration of female friendship, desire, and memory set against the sultry backdrop of Florida's swamplands.</strong> <br/><br/>It's been years since Ingrid has heard from her childhood best friend, Mayra, a fearless rebel who fled their hometown of Hialeah, a Cuban neighbourhood just west of Miami, for college in the Northeast. But when Mayra calls out of the blue to invite Ingrid to a weekend getaway at a house in the Everglades, she impulsively accepts. <br/><br/>From the moment Ingrid sets out for the house, danger looms: the directions are difficult, she's out of reach of cell service, and as she drives deeper into the Everglades, the wet maw of the swamp threatens to swallow her whole. But once Ingrid arrives, Mayra is, in many ways, just as she remembers - with her sharp tongue and effortless, seductive beauty, still thumbing her nose at the world. <br/><br/>Before they can fully settle into the familiar intimacy of each other's company, their reunion is spoiled by the reemergence of past disagreements and the unexpected presence of Mayra's new boyfriend, Benji. The trio spend their hours eating lavish meals and exploring the labyrinthine house, which holds as much mystery and danger as the swamp itself. Indoors and on the grounds, time itself seems to expand, and Ingrid begins to lose a sense of the outside world, and herself. <br/><br/>Against this disquieting setting, where lizards dart in and out of porches and alligators peek up from dark waters, Gonzalez weaves a propulsive, unforgettable story about the dizzying power of early friendship and the lengths we'll go to earn love and acceptance - even at the risk of losing ourselves entirely.

Ivona has returned to her childhood home to care for her father. While there, she reconnects with the man she divorced over ten years ago and finds herself welcomed into his family life by him and his wife. But when a new man enters Ivona's life, the trio's carefully curated dynamic is disrupted, forcing a reckoning for all involved. <br/><br/>'Slanting Towards the Sea' explores what it means to come of age in a country younger than oneself, as it sets a sensual, decades-long love story against an emerging Croatia.

<b>Sanaka Hiiragi's <i>The Lantern of Lost Memories</i> is a healing, uplifting Japanese novel about family, love, loss and humanity, and what life is really about.</b><br/><br/><b><i>One photograph, one treasured memory, one chance to go back . . .</i></b><br/><br/>Imagine waking up in a cosy photo studio in the mountains, between this world and the next. A kind man hands you a hot drink and a stack of photographs, one from every day of your life. There are hundreds, even thousands of them. They capture your best days and your worst, memories you treasure and those you try to forget. And then there are the rest, those in-between days that we didn't know were leading to the great highs and lows. Then, you are asked to pick one photograph from each year to be placed in a beautiful Japanese lantern, to be set spinning so that your life will flash before your eyes before you move on.<br/><br/>This is the task set for each guest who arrives in Hirasaka's photo studio. Like our most thumbed-over photos, our favourite memories can be tarnished in time too, so Hirasaka guides the guests back in time to relive one special day over again, to take a fresh photo and find peace.<br/><br/><b>If you could relive one day of your life, which would it be? </b>

Penelope Wells, precocious daughter of a poet, is holidaying at her family's distinctly bohemian hotel on the French Riviera. She spends the summer beneath the green umbrella pines and oppressive purple bougainvillea scribbling into her Anthology of Hates to pass the time. <br/><br/>Until she meets the Bradleys. <br/><br/>Don and Eva Bradley are well-behaved and middle-class - everything she is not. It is love at first sight. But the friendship ends in tears. Penelope and Don Bradley leave the Riviera, embarking on the painful process of growing up. She, in love with an elusive ideal of order and calm. He, in rebellion against the philistine values of his parents.

The story of the eight best teenage girl boxers in the United States, told over the two days of a championship tournament and structured as a series of face-offs.<br/><br/>As the girls' pasts and futures collide, the specific joy and violence of the sport comes to life with electric energy, and a portrait emerges of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness and sheer physical pleasure that motivates each of these young women to fight.