Savyon Liebrecht’s novel, The Bridesman, opens with the narrator on a flight from Los Angeles to Tel Aviv. It’s been twenty-four years since Micha left Israel for the United States and he’s heading back on an all-expenses-paid invitation from his beloved aunt Adella. Liebrecht’s novel, translated from the Hebrew by Gilah Kahn-Hoffmann, is a short book that tells the story of a tightly-knit Persian Jewish family that almost becomes the undoing of Adella two decades earlier. Micha does not know exactly why his aunt calls him back to Israel and how she can afford to pay his way, but he will by the end of the book.

Tokyo Love Story: A Manga Memoir of One Woman's Journey in the World's Most Exciting City, Julie Blanchin Fujita, Marie Velde (trans)(Tuttle, March 2021)
Tokyo Love Story: A Manga Memoir of One Woman’s Journey in the World’s Most Exciting City, Julie Blanchin Fujita, Marie Velde (trans) (Tuttle, March 2021)

A funny and intimate travelogue of one woman’s unexpected adventures in Japan. French illustrator Julie Blanchin-Fujita arrived in Tokyo for what she thought would be a one-year stint, and ended up never leaving.