💦 FULL SET: Beryl a - Full Gallery 2025

I went in with no expectations but this quickly became my favourite Murakami book. I adored the writing structure in the first chapter, but the compelling characters in the second and third kept me turning pages til the end. A masterful story of identity, the roles we play, libraries, and what it means to love someone.

This might be one of the issues with eternity—not knowing where you should go next. But how much value was there in a love that didn’t seek the eternal?

A healing story of how a bookshop-cafe brings together people in a community and how books touch and connect individuals. Recommended to me by a friend who described the genre as 'hopecore'.

I liked that the characters all had distinct personalities and drives, and they walk their own life journeys. But by coming together and interacting, they change for the better.

We're all inadequate, weak and ordinary beings. But because we're capable of being kind, for a moment - no matter how fleeting - we can be extraordinary.

A haunting story of a woman's transformation into a vegetarian, as told from the perspectives of the people around her. For a story that was translated from another language, the imagery was vivid and hard to stomach at many points.

CW: Themes of self-harm, sexual assault.

Inspired by the real case of the convicted con woman and serial killer, "The Konkatsu Killer," Asako Yuzuki’s Butter is a vivid, unsettling exploration of misogyny, obsession, romance and the transgressive pleasures of food in Japan.

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.

Thirty-nine women and a girl are held prisoner in a cage underground. The male guards never speak to them. The girl is the only one of the prisoners who has no memory of the outside world. One day, an alarm sounds, the guards flee; the prisoners escape. They find themselves on an immense barren plain, with no other people anywhere, and no clue as to what has happened to the world.