Vanishing World

Sayaka Murata

€ 20.99

This item arrived at our Amsterdam and The Hague stores within the past 8 weeks

If ordered before 18:00h, this title will be in our store within 24 hours.

The mind-blowing, shocking new novel from the author of the multi-million copy selling Convenience Store Woman.

"Normality is the creepiest madness there is..."

Amane is ten years old when she discovers she’s not like everyone else. Her school friends were all conceived the normal way, by artificial insemination, and raised in the normal way, by parents in ‘clean’, sexless marriages. But Amane’s parents committed the ultimate taboo: they fell in love, had sex and procreated. As Amane grows up and enters adulthood, she does her best to fit in and live her life like the rest of society: cultivating intense relationships with anime characters, and limiting herself to extra-marital sex, as is the norm. Still, she can’t help questioning what sex and marriage are for.

But when Amane and her husband hear about Eden, an experimental town where residents are selected at random to be artificially inseminated en masse (including men who are fitted with artificial wombs), the family unit does not exist and children are raised collectively and anonymously, they decide to try living there. But can this bold experiment build the brave new world Amane desires, or will it push her to breaking point?

Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori