Pink Soap - Anju Gaston

'I ask the internet the difference between something being too close to the bone and something being too close to home.' This funny and terrifying book is a study of what and how things mean, and don't, in our latest machine age. In it something unforgiveable has happened. The main character, seemingly numbed but bristling with blade-sharp understanding, is only just holding things together and trying to work out how to heal. So she travels to Japan in a search for the other half of a fragmented family. Or is it the world itself that has fragmented? Shougani examines the massive everyday pressures we're all under with real wit and style. It is pristine, brilliant, smart beyond belief. I sense it becoming as much a classic for now as Plath's The Bell Jar has been for the decades behind us.