A24

Area X has been cut off from the rest of the world for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the second expedition ended in mass suicide, the third in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition. The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself. They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—but it’s the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything.

On a summer evening in Amsterdam, two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant for dinner. At first, the conversation is a gentle hum of polite small talk - the banality of work, the latest movies they've seen. But behind the empty words, terrible things need to be said, and with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened. Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. The two boys are united by their accountability for a single horrific act - an act that has triggered a police investigation and shattered the comfortable, insulated worlds of their families. When the dinner reaches its culinary climax, the conversation finally touches on their children. As civility and friendship disintegrate, each couple shows just how far they are prepared to go to protect those they love. Tautly written, incredibly gripping, and told by an unforgettable narrator, The Dinner is an internationally bestselling phenomenon that will leave you breathless.

Life runs efficiently when nothing hurts. In Meiyu, people clip away their heaviest emotions and store them in memory drives so life can continue neatly and undisturbed. Lena is a courier who delivers these sealed fragments across the island, her days defined by routine, distance, and careful neutrality. When one delivery goes wrong, a defective drive activates in her hands. The feelings inside are not hers and were never meant to surface. Ignoring protocol, Lena follows its pull through the city, through night markets scented with scallion and fried dough, into noodle shops, and the quiet generosity of neighbors' kitchens, where lives brush against one another. With each step, the walls she's built around herself begin to thin. All That Holds Between is a gentle speculative novella about rediscovering what's lost, savoring what remains, and allowing life to hold more than function.