Seven titles in which obsession is the plot

Emily Haworth-Booth teaches at the Royal Drawing School and is an illustrator, graphic novelist, and the author of three children's books: The King Who Banned the Dark (short-listed for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, the Carnegie Medal for Illustration, and the Klaus Flugge Prize), The Last Tree, and Protest.

Mare is her debut adult novel. She lives in Devon with her husband, dog, and several horses.

At Electric Lit Haworth-Booth tagged seven books, written by women, in which obsession is the plot. One title on the list:

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

When Keiko begins her job at the convenience store she becomes what she most wants to be: “a normal cog in society.” Not only has the store supplied her with a personality, a purpose, and a behavioural code in the form of the store manual, it is literally the stuff she is made of: “When I think that my whole body is made up of food from this store, I feel like I’m as much a part of the store as the magazine racks or the coffee machine.” She thinks of the store on her days off; she even dreams of it at night. When the novel begins, Keiko has been working at the convenience store for 18 years. What follows, as the events of the novel threaten to dismantle her obsession, is not the whimsical comedy we might expect from a story set in a supermarket, but a provocative investigation into societal pressure.

Read about the other entries on the list at Electric Lit.

Convenience Store Woman is among Sarah Maria Griffin's seven titles that turn the workplace into a nightmare, Eliza Browning's ten novels about resisting productivity culture and Anne Heltzel's seven books about women who refuse to fit in.

--Marshal Zeringue