After a slow March, I hit the ground running in April and knocked a few more books off my TBR (and added a couple more to it!).
This Immaculate Body // Emma van Straaten
This was my favourite book of the month. Alice is in love with Tom, but they have never met; their only connection is that Tom pays Alice to clean his flat once a week. Alice’s quest to force a meeting with Tom sends her further and further into unsavoury territory. The final reveal was genuinely surprising and very unsettling; the seeds were sown much earlier to imply that she may not be the most reliable narrator, but it still caught me off guard. This will be a fun one to reread at some point in the future to catch all the little hints that I missed.
The Husbands // Holly Gramazio
You can tell this book was written by a game designer; the idea of a near-infinite supply of husbands randomly spawning from an attic sounds like something from the Sims. I found myself, like Lauren, getting quite attached to some of the husbands, only for them to suddenly be replaced. A nice, light, enjoyable read; nothing to stick in the mind too much, but well written and probably what I needed at that point.
Hunchback // Saou Ichikawa (tr. Polly Barton)
This is a slight little novella, and therefore very easy to read in a single sitting, as I did. The main character, like the author, lives with a congenital muscle disorder, using a ventilator and an electric wheelchair; she lives in a group home and spends much of her time writing explicit stories online. I learnt a fair bit about what it’s like to live with such a condition; this book also presents a disabled character who is flawed and who expresses her sexuality, contradicting stereotypes that permeate much content featuring disabled characters.
Sky Daddy // Kate Folk
I took an impromptu trip to Waterstones when I read about this book the other week just so I could get a copy. I’ve heard about people who fall in love with inanimate objects, but this was an interesting, entertaining dive into the mind of someone who falls into this category. The main character, Linda, makes a lot of poor choices (although who hasn’t!), but she remains easy to sympathise with throughout. Without spoiling the ending, I expected it to go in the opposite direction, but it worked well for me and retrospectively gave the characters, and the overall story, more depth.
How I Won a Nobel Prize // Julius Taranto
My boyfriend doesn’t borrow my books as he prefers dog-earing pages to using a bookmark (!), but that doesn’t stop me raiding his books from time to time; this was one of his favourite reads from the beginning of the year. You know how it will end from reading the title, but it was a fun ride to reach that point; while I would never like to end up at RIP, it was an interesting setting for a story involving a cast of disgraced academics. Through the character of Hew, we see the wider world’s reaction to the institute; Helen, the main character, is far too blinkered by her work and her crush on one such academic to closely examine the ethics of where she has brought them. The descriptions of Helen’s work lost my attention somewhat; these passages could have been edited down somewhat, but they were fine to skim over without anything being lost from the story.
Vanishing World // Sayaka Murata (tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori)
This was full of trademark Sayaka Murata weirdness, while still raising some interesting questions about how society changes over time and how we define different types of love and desire. I will read anything Murata releases in English, so I treated myself to the signed hardback edition of this. If anything, it felt at times like Murata wanted her characters to go properly off the deep end but was holding back from making them do so; this novel was originally released in Japanese back in 2015, whereas the significantly weirder and more disturbing Earthlings was released in Japanese in 2018, despite its translated version preceding this book. To me, Earthlings, which touches on some of the same themes, is the better-realised story - although Vanishing World will be a lot more accessible (and palatable) to general readers.