Hunchback

Filled with unforgettable insight

Sayaka Murata, author of Convenience Store Woman

I can honestly say I’ve never read anything like it. It’s by turns sharp and tender, both shocking and mordantly funny. It’s an incredibly generous dispatch from an experience most people simply can’t imagine (and choose to avert their eyes from). I loved it so much I could go on and on

Emmett de Monterey, author of Go the Way Your Blood Beats

Frank and unflinching, this transgressive novel about disability, privilege and desire demands your attention from the very first page. It’s a true firecracker and I was absolutely gripped by Ichikawa's bold, fresh voice.

Alice Slater, author of Death of a Bookseller

Propulsive, sexy and distilled, Hunchback is the novel on disability and desire I’ve been waiting for. Shifting between the minutiae of physical limits and broader structures of ableism, Saou Ichikawa's writing is as narratively gripping as it is explosively insightful. This is an essential book.

Daisy Lafarge, author of Paul

Defiant, subversive, sexy, dark, and full of originality. Hunchback breaks like a shard of lightning through a complacent, oppressive world.

Seán Hewitt, author of All Down Darkness Wide

Brazen in its intensity, radical in its vitality

Saba Sams, author of Send Nudes

Hunchback is an eruption. It dissolves conventional pieties around care. In Saou Ichikawa's world, constraints - both physical and social - can only be overcome by an immense and necessary flourishing of desire.

Will Harris, author of RENDANG

A forceful and original novel which will leave no reader unchanged

Nicola Dinan, author of Bellies

Uproariously funny, unflinching, and merciless. It's not very often you encounter this provocative and yet so refreshingly honest of a read.

Mariana Enriquez, author of The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

A must-read debut. Funny and frank, this book lingers in the mind long after you turn the final page

BBC Books of 2025

Written with guts and wit, Hunchback is a tender and defiant story which forces readers to think far beyond ableist concepts of who gets to desire and be desired

Best Books of 2025, AnOther Magazine

Hailed as one of the most important Japanese novels of the 21st century, Hunchback is a subversive and morally complex story that dismantles assumptions about disability. A difficult but revelatory read, expect Hunchback to be one of the most talked about books of the year

Foyles, Best Translated Fiction of 2025

One of the best books of 2025

Radio Times

A lithe, thrilling book — Saou’s writing is as sharp as a knife

Pandora Sykes

Unapologetic, unashamed and unflinching. Hunchback grips the reader with its raw, fizzing, subversive energy, even as it shakes off shackles — both physical and mental. A book that moved and thrilled us.

International Booker Prize judges

A remarkable and original study of yearning. Funny, lively and very touching.

Big Issue

Thrillingly transgressive... a difficult, intriguingly recalcitrant, form-busting book

Daily Mail

Gloriously transgressive. The novel asks us which is more important: access to culture or to sexual expression? And, like all good fiction, it doesn’t provide a straight answer.'

Guardian

Hunchback is one of the boldest and most unusual books to emerge from a mainstream publisher in years. It's a brilliant, riveting book that lets us tune into the voices we have long kept suppressed.

Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Sunday Times

Provocative and incisive, furious and blackly comic, it is a lens that focuses not only on difference, but on likeness. Here is a writer and this is her subject. Both are seriously worthy of our attention

TLS