Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales

A chilling collection of interconnected stories in which ordinary lives slip quietly into the uncanny. Across a small unnamed city, strangers cross paths in ways that grow darker with every page.

A young writer moves into a new apartment and learns her landlady may have murdered her husband. A celebrated surgeon is visited by a cabaret singer whose beauty hides a horrifying defect in her heart, his lover, consumed by jealousy, plots his death, while a solitary craftsman feels a violent envy rising inside him.

As desire turns into obsession, and curiosity into danger, the characters’ stories begin to thread together. A neighbor becomes fascinated by an abandoned house filled with unsettling tools. Grief, longing, and cruelty ripple outward, drawing murderers, mothers, children, and bystanders into the same ominous orbit.

With her signature calm, precise prose, Yoko Ogawa creates a world where the strange feels natural and the horrific seeps gently into the everyday. Revenge is a beautifully eerie tapestry of loss, desire, and quiet brutality—one that lingers long after the final story ends.

An NPR Best Book of 2013