The haunting, enigmatic love story that turned Murakami into a literary superstar in Japan, and is his bestselling title throughout the worldAutumn 1969, and soon I would be 20. When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire – to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.

‘Such is the exquisite, gossamer construction of Murakami’s writing that everything he chooses to describe trembles with symbolic possibility’ Guardian’Poignant, romantic and hopeless, it beautifully encapsulates the heartbreak and loss of faith’ Sunday Times’A masterly novel’ New York Times

WINNER OF THE MAN ASIAN LITERARY PRIZE’An authentic, moving story that brings to vivid life the deep family connections that lie at the core of Korean culture’Gary Shteyngart’Kyung-Sook Shin’s tale… has hit a nerve’Guardian’A raw tribute to the mysteries of motherhood’New York Times’The most moving and accomplished, and often startling, novel’Wall Street JournalWhen sixty-nine-year-old So-nyo is separated from her husband among the crowds of the Seoul subway station, her family begins a desperate search to find her. Yet as long-held secrets and private sorrows begin to reveal themselves, they are forced to wonder: how well did they actually know the woman they called Mother?Told through the piercing voices and urgent perspectives of a daughter, son, husband, and mother, PLEASE LOOK AFTER MOTHER is at once an authentic picture of contemporary life in Korea and a universal story of family love.

With an introduction by Banana YoshimotoA W&N Essential

From a prize-winning new voice in Korean fiction, with roots in feminist SFF, these exhilarating stories will transport you to strange new worlds, celebrating young women striving for their independence and self-expression’Radically brilliant… made me want to spark trouble and overthrow the system’ JANE FLETT’Plenty to keep you up at night, I loved the eerie beauty of the worlds Amil creates’ NAOMI ISHIGURO’Thrilling and unsettling… I loved this’ MEGAN BRADBURYIn a near future where women are an endangered minority, two young friends try to break free from a facility designed for those few who can still give birth.

Every year in a secluded seaside village, a maiden is sacrificed to a divine sea serpent. Elsewhere, the last female shaman of an indigenous tribe tells her stories to a visiting research team. And in South Korea’s Alps Grand Park, the residents exist in an exclusive world dominated by giant air purifier towers as others are left to live in the shade.

The women in these stories find themselves trapped – by circumstance, society or tradition – as they fight for a means of escape. This sweeping and subversive collection celebrates their strength and their courage, their desire for independence and self-expression. Translated by Archana Madhavan

A tale of wasted love, and beauty, by Japan’s literary masterShimamura is tired of the bustling city. He takes the train through the snow to the mountains of the west coast of Japan, to meet with a geisha he believes he loves. Beautiful and innocent, Komako is tightly bound by the rules of a rural geisha, and lives a life of servitude and seclusion that is alien to Shimamura.

Snow Country is both delicate and subtle, reflecting in Kawabata’s exact, lyrical writing the unspoken love and understated passion of the young Japanese couple.