Literary fiction masquerading as sci-fi. I, like many others, first heard about This Is How You Lose The Time War because of the Bigolas Dickolas Twitter incident of 2023, in which an innocuous tweet from a Trigun (an anime series) stan account gushing about the book absolutely catapulted it up the Amazon charts. An impressive feat, and I had kept the book on my TBR wish list pretty much ever...

I picked up How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino precisely for the reason you might think: It was touted as the inspiration behind Hayao Miyazaki’s latest Studio Ghibli movie, The Boy and the Heron. And I think I may have misunderstood what that meant at first. But after correcting my impressions, I still wanted to give it a read. It’s my first real foray into literary fiction and while there...