Frankie recommends... A Tiny Speck of Black and Then Nothing - Emily Midorikawa

Frankie says (and Emma agrees!)... A dark urban-noir mystery, with enough tension to keep you strapped to your chair for the entire read. Has all the pacing of classic crime, with the ambience of the great Kazuo Ishiguro and the off-kilter characters of Ottessa Moshfegh. Incredibly impressive for a debut, I can't stop thinking about the murky underground of Osaka and the innocent women caught up in its web. Midorikawa's voice is so strong, so polished and so haunting, her writing produces tangible sensations of dread, anticipation and fright, while slowly enfolding you into the ominously threatening back streets of Japan, without even lifting a finger. This book proves that the less you tell, the more frightening the truth can be. All the evidence of a future crime classic!! 

Emily will be in conversation about A Tiny Speck of Black and The Nothing on Wednesday 29 July. Get your tickets for the event here.

---

Anna has never met anyone like the enigmatic Loll: a British hostess at the Moonglow bar, in the Japanese city of Osaka. While Anna teaches bored students by day, Loll passes the nights in smoky, dim-lit rooms where she pours men's drinks, lights their cigarettes and laughs playfully at their jokes. With her blonde wigs, shimmering dresses and bejewelled nails, Loll cuts a mesmerising figure. But her skin bears unexplained bruises beneath its glittering facade, and Anna's concern slowly begins to grow. She is troubled by the secret of the carved jade stone necklace that her glamorous new friend seems determined to protect; the mysterious identity of Loll's best client with shadowy links to the city's underworld crime bosses; and the sight Anna witnesses one afternoon: Loll teetering alone on the edge of a railway track, caught in the deafening rush as a train hurtles by.

Unlike Anna who has come to Osaka to learn more about her half-Japanese heritage, Loll seems to have no clear reason for being there and no easily discernible past. And so when she suddenly disappears, there are only the barest of clues as to where she might have gone. But, desperate to find her friend, Anna refuses to give up. Soon she is thrown onto a trail that will take her into the darkest corners of the neon-choked metropolis - hidden, forbidden places from which those who know the city best warn her to stay away.