A woman leaves a nightclub in Jakarta wearing a pair of red shoes.

You, yes you, get to choose where she goes next—stay, leave, follow someone, disappear—and each decision opens into a different path: migration, reinvention, violence, intimacy, survival. The same figures recur across versions, slightly altered, as if each life is a draft of the last. The red shoes pass between them, sometimes as object, sometimes as echo.

Paramaditha uses the format to strip the illusion out of it—showing how lives branch, yes, but also how they’re constrained, redirected, predetermined. You move through the book, but it keeps insisting on the limits of that movement. Truly unique, and well worth the read.

2020 Harvill Secker (Penguin Random House UK) paperback. Good condition. Light general wear to covers, minor surface marks. Internally clean, no inscriptions.