Fault Lines: Shortlisted for the 2021 Costa First Novel Award

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At any rate, the narrator of this audiobook, Lydia Wilson, has a British accent, so I don't understand the accusations of discordance from some GR reviewers.

It’s everything a woman could want, yet sometimes she wonders whether she would rather throw herself off the high-rise balcony than spend another evening not talking to her husband and hanging up laundry. Merrick slowly realizes that she needs to start taking care of herself too, but it is a long, wild, journey.

I don't understand how the production company can't bother to find a Japanese descent actress/voice actor to read the part? People ‘finding themselves’ is not my thing especially when an affair is used to get a marriage back on track.

A novel/short story collection that addressed similar themes in a more dynamic way is So We Look to the Sky by Misumi Kubo, which I read earlier this year and greatly enjoyed.Not having to put it through the good-parenting filter I use for my children, or the perpetual war communication calculations I do with Tatsu, or the edited, rose-tinted truth I feed my mother. Emily Itame’s transporting debut, Fault Lines, guides readers through the streets of Tokyo from the perspective of Mizuki and her wonderfully honest and often existential thoughts. All of the inner yearnings and tribulations of Mizuki are laid bare, offering one of the fullest, most thorough depictions of a character I have ever read.

Itame explores a woman’s loss of identity and purpose with humour and honesty, subtly exposing the cracks that occur in the societal roles we so often fall into with little thought – until a fault line appears and we choose to break away. Itami does a great job of describing the protagonist’s bicultural upbringing too and how it affects her perspective on life. Itami’s prose is distant, maybe inspired by the character’s remove from her own life — Mizuki is a Japanese woman writing in English, after all. An utterly accomplished novel that navigates the inner yearnings of the heart in stylish, sparky and engrossing prose.We see her escapades with foreigners, how she has friends outside of the bubble that she’s kind of forced into.