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LiteraryContemporaryTranslated
by Durian Sukegawa
An ex-convict running a modest dorayaki stall reluctantly hires an elderly woman with an extraordinary gift for sweet bean paste — and learns something about dignity and second chances along the way. Durian Sukegawa's novel is quiet and moving, handling its themes with restraint rather than shock.
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Literary
Allen Levi
A mysterious traveler named Theo drifts into a small Georgia town and quietly changes the people who take him in. Allen Levi's debut is unhurried and gentle — a meditation on friendship, grief, and grace with no villain to speak of, just ordinary kindness given room to matter.
LiteraryContemporary
Rachel Cusk
M has been one of the most recognisable faces in the world since she was a child. When a writer meets her in a bookshop and offers to set down her life, the project spreads out across olive groves, hotel rooms and film sets, and turns into something larger than one woman's story: a steady look at how anyone finds what matters inside an ordinary life. From the author of the Outline trilogy.
ClassicsLiterary
Helene Hanff
In 1949 Helene Hanff, a New York writer with more taste than money, posts a list of out-of-print books to a shop at 84, Charing Cross Road in London. What comes back is twenty years of letters between her and a reserved bookseller named Frank Doel, trading rare editions, food parcels through the rationing years, and a friendship neither of them ever quite names. All true, and barely a hundred pages.
