Books that twisted my thinking

The first novel The Vegetarian 

​“The Vegetarian” by Han Kang is a dark and deeply unsettling South Korean literary novel divided into three parts, each narrated by a different character surrounding a woman named Yeong-hye, who one day after a haunting dream decides to stop eating meat entirely. But the novel is far from being about food. It is a quiet, poetic exploration of a woman’s radical act of resistance against a suffocating society, where her body becomes the only territory she can claim as her own. As she withdraws further from the world, she develops an obsession with becoming a plant shedding her humanity entirely. What makes the novel especially chilling is not Yeong-hye herself, but the people around her her cold indifferent husband, her obsessive brother-in-law, and her devoted but helpless sister each responding to her transformation with confusion, rage, desire or grief rather than any real understanding. Written with restrained, almost clinical beauty, it lingers long after the last page and won the International Booker Prize in 2016, introducing Han Kang to the world years before she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

A little life ;

“A Little Life” by Hanya Yanagihara (2015) is one of the most emotionally devastating novels ever written, following four college friends Willem, JB, Malcolm and Jude who move to New York City after graduation, each chasing their own ambitions in art, architecture and acting. But as the years pass and their lives unfold, the novel gradually narrows its focus almost entirely onto Jude St. Francis, a brilliant, fiercely private lawyer who carries within him a childhood and adolescence so unspeakably brutal that the full truth of it is revealed only slowly, in fragments, across hundreds of pages. Jude’s past involves layers of abuse, trauma and suffering that are among the most harrowing ever put to the page, and yet the novel is equally about the fierce, tender love that his friends, his professor Harold, and his closest companion Willem pour into him over decades love that is real and unconditional and yet consistently unable to fully reach him or heal him. It is a book about whether a person can survive what has been done to them, whether love is ever enough to undo damage, and what it means to keep living when existing itself feels like an act of endurance. At over 700 pages it is long, slow and immersive, written in Yanagihara’s lush, almost suffocating prose that pulls you so deep into Jude’s world that leaving it feels like a kind of grief. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Award in 2015 and has since built a cult following of readers who describe it as one of the most profound and painful reading experiences of their lives.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​