Unequal Loves

by Xavier Hennekinne

Unequal Loves is a luminous meditation on love, memory, and the quiet devastations of time.
A middle-aged man journeys through Japan with his wife, drifting between Kyoto’s hushed temples and Tokyo’s incandescent streets, while traversing the more elusive terrain of his own restless mind. Encounters with art, literature, and fleeting strangers awaken buried desires and long-dormant regrets, pulling him into a reckoning with the ghosts of youthful passion, lost friendships, and the fragile intoxication of beauty glimpsed in passing.
With prose that is both precise and tender, Xavier Hennekinne captures the ache of nostalgia and the gravity of the present. Unequal Loves is a profound and atmospheric novel, unafraid to linger in the silences between people, the impermanence of connection, and the bittersweet shimmer of what we almost had.
‘Hennekinne’s style is direct, witty, evocative and engaging.’ – Saturday Paper

201 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 15, 2025

About the author

Xavier Hennekinne’s short stories and essays have been published internationally.

French-born Hennekinne now lives in Sydney, Australia, after having worked around the world for international non-governmental organisations and in the UN system.

Reviews

[Jonathan Lissner · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Eric Sumac · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not gonna lie, I only picked this up because a friend recommended it — not an obvious choice for a 20-year-old. A middle-aged guy wandering Japan having a quiet existential crisis. But Hennekinne gets under your skin. The way he writes the gap between what couples say and what they actually mean felt uncomfortably real even to me. Japan here isn't aesthetic backdrop — it's disorienting in the right way, shaking loose things the narrator has been sitting with for decades. The prose is clean, a little wry, and unexpectedly funny in places. Reminded me why literary fiction exists.

[Barbara Whitehead]

Perhaps a little too intellectual for me.