Read by Mirai Booth-Ong

The bestselling author of Breasts and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami, invites listeners back into her immediately recognizable fictional world with this new, extraordinary novel and demonstrates yet again why she is one of today's most uncategorizable, insightful, and talented novelists. Fuyuko Irie is a freelance copyeditor in her mid-thirties. Working and living alone in a city where it is not easy to form new relationships, she has little regular contact with anyone other than her editor, Hijiri, a woman of the same age but with a very different disposition. When Fuyoku stops one day on a Tokyo street and notices her reflection in a storefront window, what she sees is a drab, awkward, and spiritless woman who has lacked the strength to change her life and decides to do something about it. As the long overdue change occurs, however, painful episodes from Fuyuko's past surface and her behavior slips further and further beyond the pale. All the Lovers in the Night is acute and insightful, entertaining and engaging; it will make listeners laugh, and it will make them cry, but it will also remind them, as only the best books do, that sometimes the pain is worth it. "In contrast to the many suffocating (western) conventions of romantic storytelling, it is refreshing to encounter a book of such irresistible sweet melancholy." "Kawakami's novel is uncompromisingly candid in its appraisal of the harm women inflict on one another, while never losing sight of the overarching structures that lead them to do so in the first place." "[A] brilliantly rendered portal into young women's lives." "A rich and notable examination of the varied ways women choose to live their lives and the gains and losses that come with the choices they've made…Masterful work." "The author dazzles with her exploration of emotions…Kawakami turns this study of a 'dictionary definition of a miserable person,' as Fuyuko calls herself, into an invigorating and empowering portrait. It's a winner."

Mode of access: World Wide Web