Hooked

A Paperback Original

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

Erikos life looks perfectfrom 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 Shoko: a popular lifestyle blogger whose work Eriko follows obsessively. Shoko lives a life of controlled chaosmessy 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 shes finally found what shes always longed for. But as her fascination turns to fixation and Shokos 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 well go to be seen and what happens when the ones who see us dont like what they find.