The Emissary Tawada, Yoko

Recommended by: Johanna Hedva

“Tawada is also somebody I reread every year for years; she’s had the most basin-shaped influence on my writing this past decade. The Emissary is one of her dystopian futures, it’s vague, maybe a nuclear holocaust, where old people are the strongest survivors and need to take care of the children because adults seem to have died off. One of the last paragraphs changes everything you thought was going on. It reminds me of the end of the movie Enemy. I gasped.”