'If only my Cantonese parents weren't so allergic to the word love…' What is the most unsayable thing you have ever wanted to say to your parents? For newly single food journalist Candice Chung, there's been one thing on her mind 'If anything happens, I love you.' Simple. Reasonable. If only her estranged Cantonese parents weren't so allergic to the word 'love'. Still, she's determined to tackle what's left unsaid. To find a way to unscramble what her family has been trying to tell each other all along – not in Cantonese or English, but with food. As Candice dives into the rituals of family dining, and her parents offer to join her at restaurants she's due to review, she begins to unravel how a decade of silence and distance have shaped their relationship. Through shared meals and culinary adventures – from steaming hotpots to pasta at uncomfortably romantic trattorias – they begin to confront the unspoken. And to unpick what it means to show care when you come from a culture where saying 'I love you' isn't the norm. Set against the backdrop of a burgeoning new relationship, grasped-at date nights mid-pandemic and an uncertain future across seas, Candice reflects on migration, solitude and intimacy. How can we rebuild closeness when we've drifted apart? Can food fill the gaps where words fail? For anyone who has ever found their loved ones' emotional worlds unreachable, Chinese Parents Don't Say I Love You is packed with heart, humour and those bright-hearted moments around a dinner table that bring us together. The next word-of-mouth obsession for readers of Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, Butter by Asako Yuzuki and I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Sehee.

Area X has been cut off from the rest of the world for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the second expedition ended in mass suicide, the third in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition. The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself. They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—but it’s the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything.

In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant—and that her lover is married—she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations. Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters—strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis—survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.

'If only my Cantonese parents weren't so allergic to the word love…' What is the most unsayable thing you have ever wanted to say to your parents? For newly single food journalist Candice Chung, there's been one thing on her mind 'If anything happens, I love you.' Simple. Reasonable. If only her estranged Cantonese parents weren't so allergic to the word 'love'. Still, she's determined to tackle what's left unsaid. To find a way to unscramble what her family has been trying to tell each other all along – not in Cantonese or English, but with food. As Candice dives into the rituals of family dining, and her parents offer to join her at restaurants she's due to review, she begins to unravel how a decade of silence and distance have shaped their relationship. Through shared meals and culinary adventures – from steaming hotpots to pasta at uncomfortably romantic trattorias – they begin to confront the unspoken. And to unpick what it means to show care when you come from a culture where saying 'I love you' isn't the norm. Set against the backdrop of a burgeoning new relationship, grasped-at date nights mid-pandemic and an uncertain future across seas, Candice reflects on migration, solitude and intimacy. How can we rebuild closeness when we've drifted apart? Can food fill the gaps where words fail? For anyone who has ever found their loved ones' emotional worlds unreachable, Chinese Parents Don't Say I Love You is packed with heart, humour and those bright-hearted moments around a dinner table that bring us together. The next word-of-mouth obsession for readers of Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, Butter by Asako Yuzuki and I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Sehee.

A tragic comedy of epic sweep and dimension, Skippy Dies wrings every last drop of humour and hopelessness out of life, love, mermaids, M-theory, the poetry of Robert Graves, and all the mysteries of the human heart. Why does Skippy, a fourteen-year-old boy at Dublin's venerable Seabrook College, end up dead on the floor of the local doughnut shop? Could it have something to do with his friend Ruprecht Van Doren, an overweight genius who is determined to open a portal into a parallel universe using ten-dimensional string theory? Could it involve Carl, the teenage drug dealer and borderline psychotic who is Skippy’s rival in love? Or could "the Automator", the ruthless, smooth-talking headmaster intent on modernizing the school, have something to hide? Why Skippy dies and what happens next is the subject of this dazzling and uproarious novel, unraveling a mystery that links the boys of Seabrook College to their parents and teachers in ways nobody could have imagined. With a cast of characters that ranges from hip-hop-loving fourteen-year-old Eoin "MC Sexecutioner” Flynn to basketball-playing midget Philip Kilfether, packed with questions and answers on everything from Ritalin, to M-theory, to bungee jumping, to the hidden meaning of the poetry of Robert Frost, Skippy Dies is a heartfelt, hilarious portrait of the pain, joy, and occasional beauty of adolescence, and a tragic depiction of a world always happy to sacrifice its weakest members. As the twenty-first century enters its teenage years, this is a breathtaking novel from a young writer who will come to define his generation.