20 Books You Can Read In a Weekend

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When thirty-four-year-old Ms. Shibata gets a new job in Tokyo to escape sexual harassment at her old one, she finds that, as the only woman at her new workplace she is expected to do all the menial tasks. One day she announces that she can't clear away her colleagues' dirty cups because she's pregnant and the smell nauseates her. The only thing is Ms. Shibata is not pregnant. Before long, though, the hoax becomes all-absorbing, and the boundary between her lie and her life begins to dissolve.

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"The Flowers of Buffoonery opens in a seaside sanitarium where Yozo Oba-the narrator of No Longer Human at a younger age-is being kept after a failed suicide attempt. While he is convalescing, his friends and family visit him, and other patients and nurses drift in and out of his room. Against this dispiriting backdrop, everyone tries to maintain a lighthearted, even clownish atmosphere: playing cards, smoking cigarettes, vying for attention, cracking jokes, and trying to make each other laugh. While No Longer Human delves into the darkest corners of human consciousness, The Flowers of Buffoonery pokes fun at these same emotions: the follies and hardships of youth, of love, and of self-hatred and depression. A glimpse into the lives of a group of outsiders in prewar Japan, The Flowers of Buffoonery is a darkly humorous and fresh addition to Osamu Dazai's masterful and intoxicating oeuvre"-- Provided by publisher.

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The Garretts take their first and last family vacation in the summer of 1959. They hardly ever venture beyond Baltimore, but in some ways they have never been farther apart. As these lives advance across decades, the Garretts' influences on one another ripple ineffably but unmistakably through each generation. A freshly observed, funny, joyful, brilliantly perceptive journey deep into one family's foibles, from the 1950s up to our pandemic present.

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The author takes us into an uncertain landscape after the environmental apocalypse, a world in which only the man-made has value, but some still wish to salvage the authentic. Once nature as we know it is dead, the pursuit of happiness fades into insignificance, food is scarce, and even time doesn't progress in an organized fashion. Harrow follows the picaresque journey of Khristen-- a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked by greatness as a baby when she died for a moment and then came back to life. After Khristen's failing boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and she finds that her mother has disappeared, she washes up at a "resort" on the shores of a mysterious, putrid lake the elderly residents there call "Big Girl." In a rotting honeycomb of rooms, these old ones plot actions to punish corporations and people they consider culpable in the destruction of the final scraps of nature's beauty. What will Khristen and Jeffrey, the precocious ten-year-old boy she meets there, learn from this "gabby seditious lot, in the worst of health but with kamikaze hearts, determined to refresh, through crackpot violence, a plundered earth"?

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1917. On a battlefield near the River Aisne, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory--a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night, his childhood on a faraway coast--as the snow falls. 1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near another river--alive, but not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and endeavours to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures: ghosts whose messages he cannot understand. So begins a narrative that spans four generations, moments of connection and consequence igniting and re-igniting as the century unfolds.

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"From the internationally bestselling author of Exit West, a story of love, loss, and rediscovery in a time of unsettling change. One morning, a man wakes up to find himself transformed. Overnight, Anders's skin has turned dark, and the reflection in the mirror seems a stranger to him. At first he shares his secret only with Oona, an old friend turned new lover. Soon, reports of similar events begin to surface. Across the land, people are awakening in new incarnations, uncertain how their neighbors, friends, and family will greet them. Some see the transformations as the long-dreaded overturning of the established order that must be resisted to a bitter end. In many, like Anders's father and Oona's mother, a sense of profound loss and unease wars with profound love. As the bond between Anders and Oona deepens, change takes on a different shading: a chance at a kind of rebirth--an opportunity to see ourselves, face to face, anew."-- Provided by publisher.

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In the wake of her husband Adam's death, Sarah, with a daughter and a baby on the way-and left with no money- moves in with Adam's mother, whom he always said was dead, but soon discovers why Adam lied as she becomes trapped in a house with a madwoman.

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Arriving in Minnesota Territory with no prospects, Sarah Brinton quickly marries and settling in her new life as a wife and mother, finds kinship among the Sioux women at a nearby reservation until she is caught in the middle of the Sioux Uprising of 1862 where she is lost to both worlds.

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When twenty-seven-year-old Joan Bergstrom sends a fan letter - as well as a gift of saffron - to fifty-nine-year-old Imogen Fortier, a life-changing friendship begins. As the two women commune through their letters, they build a closeness that sustains them through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of President Kennedy, and the unexpected in their own lives. Because of her correspondence with Joan, Imogen's decades-long marriage blossoms into something new and exciting, and in turn, Joan learns that true love does not always come in the form we expect it to.

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Retired policeman Tom Kettle is enjoying the quiet of his new home, but his peace is interrupted when two former colleagues turn up at his door to ask questions about a decades-old case. A traumatic case which Tom never quite came to terms with. His peace is further disturbed by a young mother and family who move in next door, a woman on the run from her own troubles. And what of Tom's family - in which everything is not quite what it seems.

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Shoji Morimoto was constantly being told by his boss, "It makes no difference whether you're here or not," and that his presence contributed nothing to the company. Shoji details thousands of his true-life adventures: accompanying a divorcee to her favourite restaurant, waving goodbye to a client from the train platform, sitting in the courtroom during a client's trial, and supporting a client during a difficult surgery. Shoji chronicles his extraordinary experiences in his unique line of work and reflects on how we consider relationships, jobs and family in our search for meaningful connection and purpose in life.

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"Celebrated for her powerful short fiction, Claire Keegan now gifts us three exquisite stories together forming a brilliant examination of gender dynamics and an arc from Keegan's earliest to her most recent work. In 'So Late in the Day,' Cathal faces a long weekend as his mind agitates over a woman with whom he could have spent his life, had he acted differently; in 'The Long and Painful Death' a writer's arrival at the seaside home of Heinrich Böll for a two-week writing residency is disrupted by an academic who imposes his criticisms and opinions; and in 'Antarctica' a married woman travels out of town to see what it's like to sleep with another man and ends up in the grip of a possessive stranger. Each story probes the dynamics that corrupt what could be between women and men: a lack of generosity, the weight of expectation, the looming threat of violence."-- Provided by publisher.

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Written with razor-sharp wit and an unflinching eye, these essays examine the late Anthony Veasna So's youth in California, the lives of his refugee parents, his intimate friendships, loss, pop culture, and more. And in linked fiction following three Cambodian American cousins who stand to inherit their late aunt's illegitimate loan-sharking business, So explores community, grief, and longing with inimitable humour and depth.

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The swimmers are unknown to each other except through their private routines, and the solace each takes in their morning or afternoon laps. But when a crack appears at the bottom of the pool, they are cast out into an unforgiving world without comfort or relief. One of these swimmers is Alice, who is slowly losing her memory. Without the fellowship of other swimmers and the routine of her daily laps she is plunged into dislocation and chaos, swept into memories of her childhood and the Japanese internment camp in which she spent the war.

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All I wanted to do was live my life in peace. Maybe get a cat, expand my spice farm. Really anything that doesn't involve going on a quest where an orc might rip my face off. But they say the Goddess has favorites. If so, I'm clearly not one of them. After saving the demon Fallon in a wine-drunk stupor, all he wanted to do was kill an evil witch enslaving his people. I mean, I get it. But he's dragging me along for the ride, and I'm kind of peeved about it. On the bright side, he keeps burning off his shirt.

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"When she receives a dermatological diagnosis of extreme sensitivity-thin skin-Jenn Shapland considers just how thin the barrier is between herself and the world, and how deeply vulnerable we all are to our surroundings. As she becomes aware of the impacts her tiniest choices have on people, places, and species far away, she can't stop seeing the ways we are enmeshed and entangled with everyone else on the planet. Despite our attempts to cordon ourselves off from risk, our boundaries are permeable. Weaving together historical research, interviews, and her everyday life in New Mexico as source material, Shapland probes the lines between self and work, human and animal, need and desire. She traces the legacies of nuclear weapons development on Native land, unable to let go of her search for contamination until it bleeds out into her own family's medical history. She questions the toxic myth of white womanhood and the fear she has been made to feel since her girlhood when traveling alone. And she explores her desire to build a creative life as a queer woman, asking whether such a thing as a meaningful life is possible under capitalism. Ceaselessly curious, uncompromisingly intelligent, and urgently seeking, with Thin Skin Shapland builds thrillingly on her genre-defying debut-"gorgeous, symphonic, tender, and brilliant" (Carmen Machado)-firmly establishing her as one of the sharpest essayists of her generation"-- Provided by publisher.

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The Vulnerables offers a meditation on our contemporary era, as a solitary female narrator asks what it means to be alive at this complex moment in history and considers how our present reality affects the way a person looks back on her past. Humor, to be sure, is a priceless refuge. Equally vital is connection with others, who here include an adrift member of Gen Z and a spirited parrot named Eureka. The Vulnerables reveals what happens when strangers are willing to open their hearts to each other and how far even small acts of caring can go to ease another's distress.

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"When I Was Your Age is a hilarious, heartwarming and surprising ode to growing up, getting older and wiser, and luck, life, and learning from the school of hard knocks, from SNL's longest-serving actor, Kenan Thompson"-- Provided by publisher.

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"The seven stories of You Glow in the Dark unfold in a Latin America wrecked and poisoned by human greed, and yet Colanzi's writing-at once sleek and dense, otherworldly and intensely specific-casts an eerily bright spell over the wreckage. Some stories seem to be set in a near future; all are superbly executed and yet hard to pin down; they often leave the reader wondering: Was that realistic or fantastic? Colanzi draws power from Andean cyberpunk just as much as from classic horror writers, and this daring is matched by her energizing simultaneous use of multiplicity and fragmentation-the book's stylistic trademarks. Freely mixing worlds, she uses the Bolivian altiplano as the backdrop for an urban dystopia and blends Aymara with Spanish. Colanzi never gets bogged down; she can be brutal and direct or light-handed and subtle. Her materials are dark, but always there's the lift of her vivid sense of humor. You Glow in the Dark seizes the reader's attention (from the title on) and holds it: this is a book that announces the arrival of a major new talent"-- Provided by publisher.

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Inspired by the twelve signs of the Chinese zodiac and their associated human characteristics, Ai Weiwei masterfully interweaves ancient Chinese folklore with stories of his life, family, and career. The narrative shifts back and forth through the years - at once in the past, present, and future - mirroring memory and our relationship to time. As readers delve deeper, they will find not only a personal history of Ai Weiwei and an examination of the sociopolitical climate in which he makes his art, but a philosophical exploration of what it means to find oneself through art and freedom of expression.

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