Set in a future Japan isolated after a great disaster, this collection centers on a title story in which vigorous elders and frail children inhabit an inverted world. Through the daily life of Yoshiro and his great-grandson Mumei, it asks fable-like questions about environmental collapse, linguistic change, and what passes between generations.

In a diminished world, the time shared by a frail child and his elderly guardian gives off a strange brightness.

In the waiting room of a Paris fertility clinic, Kimiâ Sadr is overtaken by the history of the family that fled Iran for France. The novel layers political revolution, family myth, immigrant dislocation, and sexual identity in a polyphonic and exuberant narrative.

From the quiet of a waiting room erupts a three-generation story of family memory and exile.

Aging illustrator Daniele is asked by his daughter and son-in-law to look after his young grandson Mario in a Naples apartment. Inside the enclosed home, the battle of wits between grandfather and child exposes aging, artistic anxiety, family memory, and the need to reckon with the past.

A few days of confrontation between grandfather and grandson sharply illuminate age, art, and family shadows.

A fragmentary novel in which bodies in motion, travel, anatomy, and memory echo across one another. From the perspective of wanderers, it asks where people come from, where they are going, and what the body remembers, linking episodes about Chopin's heart and anatomical specimens across time and space.

Fragments of travel and the body reveal the anxiety and freedom of lives that never stop moving.

A novel set over a few hours on the eve of a boy's birthday after a mother and son have moved to a small town in northern Norway. Though they seem bound by affection, Vibeke and Jon go out into separate nights, and the alternating viewpoints reveal loneliness and irreversible distance beside intimacy.

As mother and child move separately through a freezing night, the novel quietly illuminates the absence inside love.

This short novel links a 1907 story of grotesque experiments on the boundary between life and death at a sanatorium outside Buenos Aires with a 2009 story of an artist trying to turn his own body into art. Science, art, desire, and faith in progress converge in darkly comic form.

The boundaries between life and death, art and the body, collapse with comedy and discomfort.

A work of nonfiction centered on the testimonies of Yazidi women abducted, abused, and enslaved by ISIS, and on the beekeeper who built a dangerous network to rescue them. The author, a poet and journalist, links the record of violence with survivors' voices and the actions of ordinary people who risked themselves to help.

In the midst of extreme violence, small acts of solidarity become a form of hope.

Set in a village in colonial-era South India, the novel follows Kali and Ponna, a couple unable to conceive, as family and community pressure close in around them. They turn to faith and ritual, until a festival where marital rules loosen for one night emerges as a last possibility.

A loving couple's desire is shaken by custom and the pressure to have a child.

A story collection where Russian reality, memory, reverie, and fantasy cross into one another. Dreams of a dead father, fantasies in an American town, a disintegrating marriage, and a child's religious vision turn everyday details into entrances to other worlds through humor and lyricism.

The fantasies hidden inside ordinary life illuminate memory, politics, and loneliness.

A Norwegian novel in which the stories of Sigrid, a literature student, Linnea, an aspiring film director, Trine, a performance artist, and others intersect around art and desire. Coincidence, quotation, and fantasy accumulate as the characters long to belong to someone or something while learning to live with their own unstable oddness.

Love, art, and coincidence link together until the strangeness of ordinary life suddenly comes into view.