I've been a huge fan of Zen Cho's original, funny, smart writing for a while. This is her take on a K-Drama - my favourite TV - and it's a total delight. All the cute tropes are there, plus, of course, the complexities of love and family and politics. One of the things I love most about K-Dramas is the depth of the characters' social worlds, and here too, Cho's homage lives up to the original, as we find out about the Malaysian scandal that haunts our star-crossed lovers' efforts to find happiness in London.
'A witty and heartwarming exploration of friendship and romance. This is a succession style K-drama that is perfect for a beach read.' - Glamour
'A sweet slow-burning romance' - Heat
From the renowned, award-winning author Zen Cho comes a delightfully funny romance about family, class and love in modern London.
From the outside, Renee Goh's life looks perfect. She's thirty and beautiful, running a glamorous-and successful-fashion company in London, and dating a hot pop star.
Until she's dumped. Estranged from her family in Singapore, too, happiness soon feels a world away. A chance encounter with her first love, Yap Ket…
Strangely, this was the most hopeful book I read this year. It's unsparing about the devastation wrought by capitalist extraction, in human and ecological terms. But it's neither an elegy nor a call to action. Instead, it's an exploration of how we live and make meaning in the fractured zones that capitalism leaves us. The writing is lucid and minimalist. There are so many ideas that I read it slowly, not because it was dense or dragging, but because its short, vivid chapters are worth savouring.
What a rare mushroom can teach us about sustaining life on a fragile planet
Matsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world-and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the Northern Hemisphere. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's account of these sought-after fungi offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial question: What manages to live in the ruins we have made? The Mushroom at the End of the World explores the unexpected corners of matsutake commerce, where we encounter Japanese gourmets, capitalist traders, Hmong jungle fighters, Finnish nature guides, and more. These companions lead us into…
Reading a good book with non-binary characters still feels like a jolt of sudden joy. Gender and sexuality aren't the book's main themes, which made me love it even more. The first half, told largely from d's perspective, is a melancholy symphony on grief and the limits and possibilities of human connection. The second half gets more deeply into Korean politics, considering the diverse experiences of resistance to an authoritarian regime. It's really hard to describe this book, but don't let that put you off. It's fabulous.
What was it they were battling? Their smallness, of course, their smallness.
A delicate and arresting queer novel from one of Korea's most celebrated contemporary writers
d, a nonbinary gig worker living in Seoul, briefly escapes the grasp of isolation when they meet dd, only to be ensnared by grief when dd dies in a car accident. Meanwhile, the world around them reckons with the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster that left more than 300 dead.
As formally inventive as it is evocative, dd's Umbrella is composed of twin novellas. The first is told from the perspective of d, and the…
In 1912, Dorothy L. Sayers and five friends founded a writing group at Somerville College, Oxford; they dubbed themselves the 'Mutual Admiration Society.' Brilliant, bold, serious, and funny, these women were also sheltered and chaperoned, barred from receiving degrees despite taking classes and passing exams. But things for women were changing - they gained the right to vote and more access to the job market. And in October 1920, members of the Mutual Admiration Society returned to Oxford to receive full degrees, among the first women to be awarded such honours.
Sayers and her classmates remained lifelong friends and collaborators as they battled for a truly democratic culture that acknowledged their equal humanity. They pushed boundaries in reproductive rights, sexual identity, queer family making, and representations of women in the arts - despite the casual cruelty of sexism that still limited women's choices. Historian Mo Moulton brings these six indomitable women to vivid life, as they navigate the complexities of adulthood, work, intimacy, and sex in Interwar England.
A celebration of feminism and female friendship, Mutual Admiration Society reveals how Sayers and the members of MAS reshaped the social order - and how, together, they fought their way into a new world for women.
