May Ngo

A war film disguised as a zombie movie, Yeon Sang-ho’s K-horror classic asks whether we can choose how we die—and therefore what we choose to live for.

The Cost of Labour, Cold Enough for Snow, Found, Wanting, The Torrent

Reading Ferrante’s novel for the first time, I was amazed at how much a story set in 1950s Naples echoed my own migrant upbringing in 1980s western Sydney. 

Négar Djavadi’s novel reflects in its structure and style the often conflicting dualities that many immigrants experience: the pull between the life we know and the lives that might have been.

New Critic: Having briefly worked in a Cambodian factory, I recognised in Joseph Ponthus’ On the Line the exhaustion and absurdity of a life dictated by the clock. But in its focus on individual over class struggle, the novel also has me reflecting on what it means to have a way out.

New Critic: Memory, language and identity intertwine in Bosnian writer Semezdin Mehmedinović’s My Heart, an autobiographical novel that asks how we carry the painful duty of remembering.

New Critic: Palestinian author Adania Shibli’s novel explores how the violence of occupation stretches through history—and the inadequacy of language and translation to fully express it.