If suffering is inevitable, what does it mean to choose, knowing the outcome may not change? — Thanh Dinh
Our upcoming release started with a pilgrim in the ruins of a city that used to have a name.
It ended with a woman who kept returning to a man who was never really there.
Two worlds. Two voices. One question that refuses to resolve.
Writerly Books is announcing our next release: a dual novella collection pairing The Buddha Never Turns His Head and Full Moon in October in a single volume.
We didn’t plan it this way at first. But the longer we sat with both manuscripts, the clearer it became — these two works were always meant to find each other. Not because they’re similar. Because they are the same wound, opened from opposite ends.
Novella I: The Buddha Never Turns His Head
A nameless pilgrim returns to a homeland that has been reduced to rubble and renamed — Sand City. In a brothel, to a young girl who may or may not be listening, he tells a story about the Buddha. About Gautama. About why a man who has seen everything chooses, in the end, not to intervene.
Our first novella in this new release is not a comforting book.
The Buddha Never Turns His Head doesn’t offer enlightenment as a balm. It asks harder questions: What does it mean to witness suffering and not act? Is salvation — religious, political, personal — always an illusion? The world Thanh Dinh builds here is decaying, haunted, and shaped by centuries of collective denial. The prose is lyrical and dense, and it asks you to sit with moral discomfort the way a pilgrim sits with the weight of a ruined city.
The Buddha never turns his head. But the book will make you turn yours.
Novella II: Full Moon in October
Leia’s story doesn’t happen in a ruined city. It happens in the ordinary wreckage of an attachment that goes on too long — with a man who withholds himself, then offers just enough to keep her returning.
Full Moon in October is structured in fragments and refrains. Memory loops. Lines repeat. The narrator is self-aware and self-contradictory, and that is precisely the point — because the most painful kind of trap is the one you can name, describe in full, and still can’t leave.
Where the first novella asks its question about nations and history, this one asks it quietly, in the dark, about love. About what it costs to stay. About whether knowing something is a cycle means anything at all when you’re still in it.
Why Together?
Because war and love are not so different in the questions they leave behind.
Both novellas orbit the same impossible centre: agency in the face of inevitability. The Buddha Never Turns His Head maps this on a metaphysical, historical scale. Full Moon in October maps it on the scale of two people in a room. One collective, one intimate. Both honest about how rarely clarity changes anything.
Read them back to back and you’ll see it — the pilgrim and Leia are asking each other something across the spine of the book.
Release details, pre-order information, and cover reveal coming soon. Subscribe to our newsletter to be the first to know.