Is a literature different from what we learned to call postmodern emerging? The question deserves more than a hurried label. A novel can return to history, defend its characters’ dignity or move its readers without inaugurating a new era. It can also retain fragmentation, uncertainty and irony while using them for purposes other than sceptical detachment.

This assessment offers a hypothesis: in a significant part of the selected corpus, experimentation serves experience and its consequences. Our inquiry does not establish a unified worldwide school. It does suggest that the function assigned to narrative forms deserves renewed scrutiny.

The scope of the comparison

The selection includes eight novels first published between 2021 and 7 October 2026, together with a novel originally written in Kannada, a language of southern India, whose recent international circulation broadens the comparison to another literary tradition. It brings together works connected with Korea, Mexico, Zimbabwe, Poland, Nigeria, Europe and the United States. It is international rather than exhaustive: traditions and languages remain absent, and translation availability shapes what becomes visible.

Sales and prizes are not treated as measurements of greatness. The books were selected to compare memory and archives, multiple voices, expressive restraint, allegory, uncertainty and fantasy. The inquiry draws on editorial and bibliographical documentation, available introductions to theoretical studies, and identified critical materials. It does not replace a complete comparative reading of every book. Its claims about form are argued hypotheses, not declarations that the writers belong to a movement.

Memory need not demand transparency

Han Kang’s We Do Not Part links friendship, remembrance and documentation of a massacre on Jeju. Its English circulation in 2025 should not be confused with its Korean publication in 2021. The relationship between memory and experience invites us to consider historical commitment without demanding the transparency of a chronicle. [1]

The question this example opens is crucial: uncertainty about how to narrate an event does not amount to indifference about whether it happened. A narrative can acknowledge the difficulties of transmission while retaining the gravity of the past. That combination is more precise than a general announcement that realism has returned.

Intimate lives make social structures visible

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count, published in 2025, connects four women’s lives across Nigeria and the United States. Their positions, aspirations and resources differ. Its comparative interest lies in the possibility of bringing stories together to consider inequality without dissolving individual experience into a single representative life. [2]

Fernanda Melchor’s Páradais, published in Spanish in 2021, connects desire, obsession and violence in a setting marked by Mexican inequality. It supplies a useful contrast: attention to social reality need not offer consolation or exemplary characters. A narrative’s ethical force can reside in what it makes unbearable. [3]

David Szalay’s Flesh, published in 2025, follows István between Hungary and Britain through restrained prose and decisive stages. In contrast to a large ensemble novel, omission can also make the effects of money, the body and circumstances perceptible without supplying a full explanation of consciousness. [4]

As a counterpoint, Vivek Shanbhag’s Sakina’s Kiss, translated from Kannada into English in 2023 and published in the United States in 2025, connects a family crisis with prejudice and political tensions. The gap between perception and truth remains central. Its circulation reminds us that an international publishing novelty does not automatically date a literary invention. [5]

Irony and fantasy remain at work

NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory, published in 2022, addresses power through a fictional animal nation and multiple voices, taking Mugabe’s overthrow as a reference. Satire becomes a form of political intervention. Its presence rules out the claim that contemporary seriousness has displaced humour and allegory. [6]

Olga Tokarczuk’s Empuzjon, published in Polish in 2022 and translated as The Empusium in 2024, places male discussions and disturbing events in a sanatorium in 1913. Its combination of debate, identity and horror offers another contrast: questioning who has authority to describe the world may require a deliberately strange form. [7]

Katie Kitamura’s Audition, published in 2025, develops competing narratives around an actress and a young man. It is a necessary counterexample to any triumphal account of restored stability: roles and relationships remain uncertain. Yet uncertainty can investigate intimacy rather than merely display narrative artifice. [8]

The most recent example is George Saunders’s Vigil, published in January 2026. An oil executive’s death brings together living and dead visitors. Environmental responsibility is approached through supernatural invention. Our comparative hypothesis is that imagination and moral inquiry can reinforce one another without producing a conventional narrative. [9]

A changing function, not yet an established school

Identifying a movement would require more than shared themes: sufficiently comparable procedures, recognisable connections between participants, and a critical reception capable of distinguishing their differences. A manifesto would not be essential. But a resemblance so broad that almost any novel could qualify would have little explanatory value.

The experiment therefore identifies a partial convergence. These works invite us to consider narrative as a form of knowledge and a relationship with lives exposed to historical forces. They do not share a single aesthetic. Nor do they establish that postmodernism, which was never simply cynicism, has ended across all literary traditions.

The more useful question becomes: what does a narrative achieve by fragmenting, ironising or making knowledge uncertain? If these procedures help recognise experience and responsibility, their function may change while their form remains. That is a hypothesis worth pursuing, not yet the name of a new era.

Read the companion inquiry : Thinking about literature today: new proposals and disagreements after postmodernism.

Sources and references

1. Han Kang (2021 / 2025)
2. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2025)
3. Fernanda Melchor (2021)
4. David Szalay (2025)
5. Vivek Shanbhag (2023 / 2025)
6. NoViolet Bulawayo (2022)
7. Olga Tokarczuk (2022)
8. Katie Kitamura (2025 / 2026)
9. George Saunders (2026)
10. Han Kang : bibliographie / bibliography

Further reading

For further reflection on defining literature and organising narrative, see Philip Bates’s Definir el fenómeno literario, volume I and volume II. These books are available in Spanish from Bubok: volume I and volume II.

Alba Longa’s The Architecture of Crime examines information, mystery and readers’ expectations in crime fiction. The English ebook is available on Payhip. These links extend the questions of form and knowledge discussed here; they do not present the catalogue’s books as evidence of a new movement.

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