"2026 International Booker Prize Winner"
Yang Shuang-Zi’s debut essay collection looks back at the origins of her life with witty humor, conveying her most profound and moving love and longing for her late twin sister.

Home is the place that bears the most scars of life. In this fractured, scattered family akin to a chaotic era, everyone has a dramatic role to play.

The title essay sets the scene immediately: a concrete house built without any right angles by a grandmother who was not an architect, two living rooms, two front doors, two bathrooms, two staircases, not a single room a rectangle. A father who vanished like the wind. A mother who stepped back from parenting early. A bullying uncle. A live-in grandfather with nowhere else to go. Into this disorder were born a pair of twins. They shared everything: one book between them, a beating for misbehaving, a video game level to clear together. Through all of it — parents present, parents absent — they were each other’s constant.

But what is home? What is eternity? It wasn't until her sister passed away— turning "we" into "I" and knocking her days out of cosmic balance—that she realized the labyrinth of life winds endlessly, and the only constant is loss...