Sayaka Murata: Earthlings, Gebunden

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In her brilliantly bizarre follow-up to Convenience Store Woman, which has sold over one million copies worldwide and charmed fans from Sally Rooney to Viet Thanh Nguyen, Sayaka Murata cements her status as a master chronicler of the outsider experience and introduces a wonderful new misfit hero. As a child, Natsuki knows she doesn't belong in her family. Her parents favor her sister, and her best friend is a plush hedgehog toy named Piyyut, who has told her that he is visiting from the planet Pohapipinpobopia to help her save the Earth. Each summer, Natsuki counts down the days until the family drives far into the mountains of Nagano to the home of her grandparents, a traditional wooden house in the forest with an old silkworm farm in the attic. There she reunites with her beloved cousin, Yuu, who has confided that he is an extraterrestrial and is waiting for the spaceship to take him back to his home planet. Natsuki starts to wonder if she might be an alien too. Returning back to her lonely house in the city, Natsuki finds life in the real world even harder than before. Ignored and abused by her family, preyed upon by a young teacher at her cram school, and missing her cousin desperately, Natsuki recalls the days with Yuu as her sole balm. In a world that demands that women and men couple up to make babies, it is up to Yuu and Natsuki to reform the world in their own image. When Natsuki later reunites with Yuu, she decides to ignore all societal expectations and live the way a true non-earthling should. Sometimes dreamlike, sometimes nightmarish, and always wonderful, Earthlings interrogates what it means to be happy and free in a world that seems intent on suffocating anyone straying outside its rigid norms.