Maggie O'Farrell's tenth novel takes her back to Ireland and to her own family: a mapmaker and his son on a post-famine peninsula in 1865, a sacred well, and a land that remembers everything. Sweeping, mythic, and O'Farrell at her best.

A missing cat, a vanished wife, and a dry well pull Toru Okada into Japan's buried wartime past in Murakami's sprawling, strange Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Twenty years ago it was my introduction to him, so I went back to see if it would hit the same way — and found even more in it this time.

Japan is shrinking. On a visit last year I noticed older people everywhere still working — in the konbinis late at night, directing traffic in Kyoto. It sent me down a rabbit hole, and eventually to Alone in Japan by Tom Feiling, a compelling look at a country facing a demographic crisis unlike anything the world has seen before.

I first read this seventeen years ago and still remembered being impressed. Now, with a Netflix adaptation filming in Co. Wicklow — and a chance encounter with the crew — it felt like exactly the right time to return to Claire Keegan's Walk the Blue Fields.