‘Healing Fiction’ Offers the Escape Many Readers Need Right Now

Eddie Winston is Looking for Love by Marianne Cronin

Ninety-year-old Eddie is a kindhearted romantic who befriends a young woman, Bella. When she finds out that he has never been kissed, she becomes determined to help him find love. This often-humorous December 2024 release — one of those special books that can make you feel a little better about humanity — is written by the British author of the uplifting 2021 gem The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot.

Before We Forget Kindness by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, translated by Geoffrey Trousselot

With his 2015 novel Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Japanese author Kawaguchi introduced readers to the quirky Tokyo café Funiculi Funicula, where customers could take a seat in one specific chair (when the ghost who normally occupies it goes to the bathroom) and travel through time — as long as they come back before their coffee gets cold. The novel was an instant megahit, spawning a feature film adaptation and launching a series that has sold more than 6 million copies in nearly 50 languages. Kawaguchi is now up to Book 5, and each one features a new cast of characters who come to seek the café’s mystical powers; the latest work focuses on regret and grief, with time travelers that include a new mother whose husband died before he could name their baby and a woman who seeks her father’s forgiveness for eloping without his blessing.

Marigold Mind Laundry by Jungeun Yun, translated by Shanna Tan

In this best-selling novel from South Korea, a young woman named Jieun has mysterious powers, and one night she creates the Magical Mind Laundry. It’s a place where customers can go to have their unhappy memories erased, a la the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The process is as follows: As they tell their sad tales, Jieun turns the memory into a stain on a piece of clothing, then throws it into the washing machine, and then — poof! — the stain turns into flower petals that float away.

The Curious Kitten at the Chibineko Kitchen by Yuta Takahashi, translated by Cat Anderson

Debuting in the U.S. on Feb. 4, this is a lovely, moving story set at a snug seaside café near Tokyo, where the food offers customers a chance to see the people they’ve loved and lost. It’s billed as “a warm hug of a novel,” and that’s a good description, but it’s not saccharine: Those customers are wrestling with feelings of guilt and deep sorrow surrounding their loved ones’ passing, but the connections they make (with the dead and the living) help heal their wounds.

The Dallergut Dream Department Store by Miya Lee, translated by Sandy Joosun Lee

Reminiscent of Pixar’s high-concept Inside Out franchise, this Korean novel takes place in a department store inside the collective unconscious where humans and animals alike can go to buy dreams. Each floor focuses on a different kind of dream, such as childhood memories, dreams of becoming famous, moments with dead loved ones, and fantasies of flying — which tend to be sold out. Our window into this world is a new hire named Penny, whose coworkers include the likes of dream designer Babynap Rockabye and nightmare producer Maxim. (If you can’t get enough of the gentle workplace antics, there’s also a sequel, The Dallergut Dream-Making District, coming in English on June 24.)

The Teller of Small Fortunes by Julie Leong

This cozy fantasy is the debut novel of Julie Leong, a Chinese-Malaysian-American author who works a corporate start-up job by day and grew up between New Jersey and Beijing. The feeling of living between two worlds colors her story of Tao, a wandering immigrant fortune teller. Tao focuses exclusively on “small fortunes,” related to subjects like whether or not it will hail and when the cows will give birth to their calves. When one of her predictions turns out to be a bigger deal than she anticipates, Tao finds herself part of a ragtag crew that includes an ex-mercenary, a semi-reformed thief, a baker and a magical cat as they search for a lost child. It’s a sweet tale of found family that’s much warmer and gentler than its plot might sound at first.

The Life Impossible by Matt Haig

This impressively prolific British author hit it big with his novel The Midnight Library, voted the best work of fiction in 2020 by Goodreads users. In his latest bestseller, a 72-year-old British retired math teacher named Grace Winters inherits a house in Ibiza from a former coworker whom she knew little about and lost touch with through the years. Still trying to find her footing after the recent death of her husband, Grace decides to head down to the Mediterranean island to see this odd inheritance. But soon the island begins to work its magic on her in a tale that dives into magical realism while also touching on more serious topics like grief, depression and suicide.

The Crescent Moon Tearoom by Stacy Sivinski

Set in 19th-century Chicago, this fantasy novel follows the clairvoyant Quigley triplets, who run a tea shop where they read fortunes in the bottoms of their customers’ cups. But their bond faces new pressures when they seem to fall under a family curse that threatens to pull them in different directions: Anne begins developing stronger powers than her sisters, Beatrix has promise as a writer, and Violet starts falling for a trapeze artist and a life in the circus. Meanwhile, they also find themselves having to help the Council of Witches when the city’s Diviner loses her magical abilities. Autumnal and witchy, it might remind you a bit of the movie Practical Magic.

The Café with No Name by Robert Seethaler, translated by Katy Derbyshire

The Vienna-born Seethaler is both an actor and an acclaimed novelist, whose A Whole Life was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. His latest, The Café with No Name, was a bestseller in Europe after it was released in 2023. Set in Vienna in the 1960s, the heartwarming novel follows Robert Simon, a shy young man who was raised as an orphan and decides to buy and revitalize a dilapidated café in the Karmelitermarkt district to have a place to call his own. The café soon emerges as a neighborhood hangout for a diverse cast of lost souls — including yarn-factory workers, a cheesemonger, a wrestler, a vicar and a butcher — who come here to unwind, make friends and fall in love. Intersecting tales span over a decade in a work that might call to mind a Mitteleuropa take on Cheers. It debuts in the U.S. on Feb. 25.