New books: American Hagwon, The Hallmarked Man and Neviditelné minuty

Neviditelné minuty

Jana Poncarová · Motto

Neviditelné minuty (Invisible Minutes), published by Motto, is described in Czech book-trade coverage as Poncarová's boldest work to date.³

The novel sets two women writers side by side, one working in 2023 and one in 1845, using the near two-century gap between them to examine how little the pressures on female authors have actually changed.³

The Hallmarked Man

The Hallmarked Man is the 63rd case for Lieutenant Eve Dallas in the long-running futuristic detective series, this time centred on the hunt for a killer whose motives make him unusually easy to sympathise with.¹¹

The plot turns on Steve Redman, whose wife and son died along with roughly two hundred neighbours in a gas explosion thirteen years earlier, and who vanished from his hospital bed six years ago. When bioengineering director Lawrence Chu and a colleague, Ezra Dent, are murdered in identical, ferocious fashion, the investigation exposes a gulf between the green image cultivated by their employer, Banner-Wyst, and its murkier dealings.¹¹

American Hagwon

Min Jin Lee · 29 September 2026

American Hagwon, released on 29 September, is Min Jin Lee's third novel and, by her account, the third instalment of a planned four-book cycle about the Korean diaspora. It follows the Koh family — parents John and Helen and their children Bo, DH and Mido — as a personal betrayal combined with the 1997 Asian financial crisis shatters their comfortable Seoul existence and pushes them to relocate first to Sydney, then finally to Southern California.¹¹⁴⁵

The story tracks the children as they grow: Mido, still a teenager, leaves school to work at a hagwon rather than finish university; Bo struggles with repeated exam failures; and DH treats his schooling as a route to playing soccer in America. Coverage of the book frames the hagwon, Korea's after-school cram academy, as almost as ubiquitous as water there, and as an outlet for immigrant families' ambition, fear, sacrifice and hope.⁵⁷