There’s a unique greatness and grace to succinct stories that truly pack a punch. The kind of story that you ruminate on for far longer than it took you to read. Find great enjoyment, long after you turn the final page, in these compelling novellas.
Winter In Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin
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 as a receptionist in a tired guesthouse. One evening, an unexpected guest arrives - a French cartoonist determined to find inspiration in this desolate landscape.
The two form an uneasy relationship. When she agrees to accompany him on trips to discover an authentic Korea. But he takes no interest in the Sokcho she knows - the gaudy neon lights, the scars of war, the fish market where her mother works. As she’s pulled into his vision and taken in by his drawings, she strikes upon a way to finally be seen.
Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life by Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle
From the discomfort of my own home I buy dresses, look up recipes, do online surveys.
An unnamed young woman in her late twenties navigates unemployment, boredom, chronic illness and online dating. Her activities are banal - applying for jobs, looking up horoscopes, managing depression, going on Tinder dates. She observes the ambiguities of social interactions, the absurd intimacies of sex and the indignity of everyday events, with a skepticism about the possibility of genuine emotion, or enlightenment. Like life, things are just unfolding, and sometimes, like life, they don’t actually get better.
Assembly by Natasha Brown
Over the course of twenty-four hours, the whip-smart young narrator of Assembly receives a cancer diagnosis, decides not to tell her posh white boyfriend, accepts a long-awaited promotion from her toxic boss - and wrestles with the question of her own existence. She has spent her twenties climbing against the current, overcoming adversity, being twice as good, always reaching for that glass ceiling. But what has it all been for? And why should she fight for a life that has never truly been hers?
A breathtakingly bold and timely provocation about what it means to be truly safe and truly free.
At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop
Alfa and Mademba are two of the many Senegalese soldiers fighting in the Great War. Together they climb dutifully out of their trenches to attack France’s German enemies whenever the whistle blows, until Mademba is wounded, and dies in a shell hole with his belly torn open.
Without his more-than-brother, Alfa is alone and lost amidst the savagery of the conflict. He devotes himself to the war, to violence and death, but soon begins to frighten even his own comrades in arms. How far will Alfa go to make amends to his dead friend? At Night All Blood is Black is a hypnotic, heartbreaking rendering of a mind hurtling towards madness.
The Union of Synchronised Swimmers by Cristina Sandu
It’s summer behind the Iron Curtain, and six girls begin a journey to the Olympics. But will they come back?
In a stateless place, on the wrong side of a river separating East from West, six girls meet each day to swim. At first, they play, splashing each other and floating languidly on the water’s surface. But as summer draws to an end, the game becomes something more. They hone their bodies relentlessly. Their skin shades into bruises. Then, one day, it finally happens - their visas arrive. But can what’s waiting on the other side of the river satisfy their longing for a different kind of life?
_Night Blue_by Angela O'Keeffe
Potent, haunting and lyrical, Night Blue is a debut novel like no other, a narrative largely told in the voice of the painting Blue Poles. It is a truly original and absorbing approach to revisiting Jackson Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner as artists and people, as well as a realigning our ideas around the cultural legacy of Whitlam’s purchase of Blue Poles in 1973.
It is also the story of Alyssa, and a contemporary relationship, in which Angela O'Keeffe immerses us in the essential power of art to change our personal lives and, by turns, a nation.
