Reserve your copy now! Expected release is March 17, 2026. Will ship on or after March 17, 2026. Limited copies available. 

From the author of the international bestseller Butter comes a chilling and perceptive novel about obsession, female friendship, and the slow unraveling of two lives.

Eriko’s life looks perfect—from her prestigious job at a Japanese trading firm to her spotless apartment and devoted parents. Her newest project, to reintroduce the controversial Nile Perch into the Japanese market, is as ambitious as she is. But beneath her flawless surface lies a consuming loneliness. Eriko has never been able to hold on to a real friend.

Enter a popular lifestyle blogger whose work Eriko follows obsessively. Shoko lives a life of controlled chaos—messy apartment, take-out dinners, a kind, easy-going husband. She writes about daily contentment, though her fractured relationship with her father gnaws at the edges of her happiness.

When Eriko orchestrates a “chance” meeting with Shoko, the two women strike up an unlikely connection. For a fleeting moment, Eriko believes she’s finally found what she’s always longed for. But as her fascination turns to fixation and Shoko’s carefully balanced life begins to dissolve, both women are pushed to breaking points neither of them saw coming.

Deftly translated by Polly Barton, Hooked is a taut, provocative novel about modern womanhood, the hunger for connection, and the quiet, ordinary ways our lives can spiral out of control. With razor-sharp insight and disarming empathy, Asako Yuzuki explores how far we’ll go to be seen and what happens when the ones who see us don’t like what they find.

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Asako Yuzuki was born in Tokyo in 1981. Her English-language debut, Butter, an international bestseller, was named Waterstones Book of the Year 2024 and took home the British Book Awards 2025 Debut Fiction Award. For Hooked, she received the Yamamoto Shūgorō Award.

Polly Barton is a Japanese-English translator and writer based in the UK. Her translations include Butter by Asako Yuzuki, So We Look to the Sky by Misumi Kubo, Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki, and There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura. Her translation of Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai was awarded a 2023-2024 Lindsley and Masao Miyoshi Translation Prize.