'An epic Indonesian novel that portrays the nation's fraught history as a kaleidoscopic, at times lurid magical realist narrative around Dewi Ayu, who rises from the dead having passed away 21 years ago. It's a shaggy dog tale which frankly and at times humorously and lyrically details massacres, sexual enslavements, and literal and metaphorical hauntings. Staggering in scope and a feverish and unusual read.'

'A memoir that feels like a reckoning - it's a devastating portrait of grief, and the burden and gift of the love between a mother and daughter. Zauner describes the gulf between an immigrant parent and their child in a way I've never seen before.'

'Reading this collection of memoir-based essays, I feel seen. Not only because Chee is also gay and mixed-race, but in how he sees the world around him: funny, overwhelming, rife with residual triumph and trauma. Of the generation before him, Chee writes, “I feel I owe them my survival.” This debt becomes a gift — an example of how writing about our own experiences can open us up to the experiences of other people, living and departed.'

'This exquisite collection of poems left me breathless. Chan is so deft at her craft, that each poem delivers themes of love and dissonance, identity and longing, queerness and dislocation, with a lightness of touch while being profoundly moving. Although it’s easy to devour this in one sitting, this slim volume will stay with you for a long time.'

'This coolly observed novel about a translator at the International Criminal Court combines mystery, sociopolitical intrigue and romantic yearning. A profoundly lonely narrator falls for an unavailable man while working to translate for a charismatic but brutal war criminal in her day job, while simultaneously becoming obsessed with an unsolved mugging in her new city. It's a puzzle box of a novel, all elements working together to stunning effect – and it says a lot about the things that go untranslated or misunderstood in our daily lives.'

'Funny, moving, subversive and formally inventive, each story in this book feels like it has something to say about what a story can be.'

'Matsuda takes traditional Japanese ghost stories, wronged women, and transforms them. These ghost ladies are spunky, sarcastic, and joyful. They find new ways of living in their afterlives. For several of them, death becomes not the end but a kind of freedom. These stories have a fresh feminist flavour but they also draw on the very old idea that yokai, demons, are often just spirits, that haven't been worshipped properly. They are not monstrous by nature they are monstrous because they have been treated monstrously. It is a delicious mix of old and new, of the serious and the playful.'