All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami

All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami

FINALIST for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction

A BEST BOK OF 2022
Oprah Daily・TIME Magazine・Washington Post・Publishers Weekly・Lit Hub

Bestselling author of>Breasts and Eggs Mieko Kawakami invites readers 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 copy editor 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 Fuyuko 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 readers 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 the skilled hands of Bett and Boyd, Kawakami's prose is instantly recognizable--immediate, incisive, and unfailingly honest.--Katie Kitamura, Entertainment Weekly (A Most Anticipated Book of 2022)

Mieko Kawakami, who was born in the prefecture of Osaka, began her career as a singer and songwriter before turning to writing in 2006. Her first novella, My Ego, My Teeth, and the World, was nominated for the Akutagawa Award and won the Tsubouchi Shoyo Prize for Young Emerging Writers when it was published in 2007. Breasts and Eggs, a short novella, was released the next year. It was awarded the Akutagawa Prize, Japan's highest literary distinction, and praised by noted author Yoko Ogawa. Paradise, The Night Belongs to Lovers, and the substantially extended Breasts and Eggs, Kawakami's first novel published in English, are among her works.