‘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 he has never been kissed, she becomes determined to help him find love. This often-humorous 2024 release — one of those special books that can make you feel a little better about humanity — was 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 has just published Before I Knew I Loved You, the sixth and last book in the series. Each one features a new cast of characters who come to seek the café’s mystical powers.

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, à 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. in 2025, 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. A follow-up, The Calico Cat at the Chibineko Kitchen, came out earlier this year.

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 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. Our window into this world is a new hire named Penny, whose coworkers include dream designer Babynap Rockabye and nightmare producer Maxim. (If you can’t get enough of the gentle workplace antics, there’s also a sequel, Return to the Dallergut Dream Department Store, which was published in English in 2024.)

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,” such as whether 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 Midnight Train by Matt Haig

This is another poignant novel (2026) by the mega-bestselling author of The Midnight Library. The protagonist, Wilbur, 81, at the moment of his death, is given a chance to revisit and reassess his life by boarding a ghostly train that transports him through the highs and lows of his past. Among his missteps, he realizes, is his all-consuming devotion to his bookselling business at the expense of his marriage. What if he had done things differently? What if it’s not too late to find out? There’s a whiff of A Christmas Carol in the premise, which could feel clichéd in unskilled hands, but Haig pulls it off nicely.  

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. (An English translation was published in the U.S. in 2025.) 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 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.