"As a child, Natsuki doesn't fit into her family. Her parents favor her sister, and her best friend is a plush toy hedgehog named Piyyut who has explained to her that he has come from the planet Popinpobopia on a special quest to help her save the Earth. Each summer, Natsuki counts down the days until her family drives into the mountains of Nagano to visit her grandparents in their wooden house in the forest. One summer, her cousin Yuu confides to...

2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE

As if Marguerite Duras wrote Convenience Store Woman—a beautiful, unexpected novel from a debut French Korean author
It's winter in Sokcho, a tourist town on the border between South and North Korea. The cold slows everything down. Bodies are red and raw, the fish turn venomous, beyond the beach guns point out from the North's watchtowers. A young French Korean woman works...

"A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: it is close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing - and ideally, very little thinking. She is sent to a nondescript office building where she is tasked with watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods. But observing someone for hours on end can be so inconvenient and tiresome. How will she stay awake?...

"Otowa has woven a series of delightful vignettes of life in Japan, from a true historical story of feuding villages to a man who steals shoes at temples...and some highlighting the cultural differences between Japanese and American sensibilities, especially for women." - Ginny Tapley-Takemori, translator of Convenience Store Woman From the unique standpoint of an American woman who married into a Japanese family and has lived in Japan for more than...

"Brody Ellis is down on his luck. His mom walked out when he was a kid, his father recently committed suicide, he's behind on his rent, and now he needs medication for his sister, Molly, who has cerebral palsy. In a desperate bid for some fast cash, Brody robs a convenience store, but he bumps into a young woman as he makes his escape, and realizes too late that he dropped his wallet at the scene of the crime. Just when he expects the police to break...

"Viggo Bergman, hopeless romantic, is thoroughly weary of waiting for his happily ever after. But between opening a romance bookstore, running a romance book club, coaching kids' soccer, and adopting a household of pets-just maybe, he's overcommitted himself?-Viggo's chaotic life has made finding his forever love seem downright improbable. Enter Tallulah Clarke, chilly cynic with a massive case of writer's block. Tallulah needs help with her thriller's...

Even as a pregnant, unwed teen in 1974, Sandy Lincoln wanted to do the right thing. but when an ageless woman approached her in a convenience store with a mysterious prophecy and a warning, doing the right thing became even more unclear. She made the best choice she could....and has lived with the consequences.

Stories on Indian women in the U.S. In Clothes, a bride's fairy-tale vision of America is shattered when her husband who runs a convenience store is murdered and she must face the future on her own, while in The Word Love, a woman's affair with a married man ruins her relationship with her mother.

Khadija (Saadia Bentaïeb) is a fifty-eight-year-old Maghrebi cleaning woman living in Brussels in the wake of the 2016 bombings that shook the city. After work one night, she falls asleep on the last subway train, wakes up at the end of the line and has no choice but to make her way home—all the way across the city—on foot. Along the way, she has a series of encounters: with a security guard, a convenience store clerk, a group of teenagers. She...

"In a near-future New York City in which both global warming and a tremendous economic divide are making the city unlivable for many, a huge superstorm hits, leaving behind only those who had nowhere else to go and no way to get out. Makayla is a 24-year-old woman who works at the convenience store chain that's taken over the city. Jesse, an 18-year-old, genderqueer, anarchist punk lives in an abandoned IRT station in the Bronx. Their paths cross...