Category: Book of the Week

Do you ever say, ‘Yes, I want to the read that book’ solely because of how aesthetically pleasing its cover is? Well, that’s what Sang Young Park’s Love in the Big City is for me. It seems to be an energetic novel that centres on the Korean city of Seoul, particularly its bright and lively…

Despite seeming like an interesting novel, Dizz Tates Brutes seems to have middling reception online. On average, it seems to skirt around the three-star territory, which I did not expect considering I have seen it popping up a lot on social media across the last couple of years. This novel, at its core, appears to…

Cutesy, feel-good novels aren’t something I often seek out, but I’m also not opposed to occasionally indulging in some pleasant reading material. So, novels like The Door-To-Door Bookstore don’t often appear on my reading radar. Carsten Henn’s bestseller is set in a small German town, focusing on a book delivery man called Carl and a…

I have made my love for both short stories and Japanese fiction rather obvious here on The Steady Read. So, logically, it makes sense that the The Book of Tokyo: A City in Short Fiction has been on my radar for almost two years now. Containing short stories written by nine different Japanese authors, this…

As a Brit, Orwell’s cautionary tale of a dystopian society in Nineteen Eighty-Four feels increasingly relevant to modern-day politics and living. Naturally, there’s some truth and hyperbole in that opening, but what else am I supposed to say? Almost everyone knows about George Orwell’s famous final novel, and it has been referenced and parodied a…

Firstly, what a stunning cover, and secondly, I must admit that I am not really one for reading fantasy novels. Yet, Bennett’s Foundryside seems quite appealing—however, it is also the first in a trilogy of works, and book series are something I am iffy about. Foundryside is set in a post-industrial world, where four merchant…

Here is a novel that I am sure wasn’t all that popular across 2020 and 2021. I say that Because Ling Ma’s Severance is about the outbreak of the fictional Shen Fever (yes, from China) in 2011, which causes its victims to suffer from lapses in memory, headaches, disorientation, shortness of breath, and fatigue. The…

To be honest, I quite enjoy publications that really toy with the reader. Whether that be with all their self-awareness, their great humour, their ability to bait and switch, or just some amusing quality that makes them unique. The problem is that producing a piece of fiction that doesn’t completely fumble this is rather challenging,…

Modern gothic, anyone? It seems to be a genre that is largely dead, but Johanne Lykke Holm’s novel Strega is one of the few modern-day examples of the genre. I suppose that makes the genre ‘modern’ gothic all the more fitting. The story of Strega centres on nine young women who are sent to work…

Murakami, Murakami, Murakami… how I, we, almost everybody, adores his literary works. Personally speaking, I tend to indulge in one of his novels roughly once or twice a year, as if to savour them. Slight tangent aside, The Elephant Vanishes isn’t actually a novel, but rather a 2005 collection of seventeen short stories the long-praised…