Fruit of Evolution is back!
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I, like many of you, was pretty down when Hanashi Media stopped producing more Fruit of Evolution novel volumes. Since then, I've been checking monthly to see if they or anyone else had picked up the license and started translating again. For over a year, it's been radio silent. Then just a few minutes ago, I decided to check again. And after googling Fruit of Evolution Light Novel Renewal, I got the usual suspects: the Reddit post asking about finding the volumes after the discontinue, the JNC Forum post about Tentai shutting down, but then, further down the page, there it was. From the Hanashi Store: Fruit of Evolution Volume 12. My brain misfired for a moment before I clicked the link. I was taken to Hanashi's store where they listed FOE volume 12 for sale, with a Coming Soon release date. At first, I was disappointed. Thought it was a forgotten remnant from the discon. But I checked my Kindle app and saw I only had volumes 1 through 10. I'd been eagerly awaiting 11 when they pulled the series. So I checked their store page for volume 11, and there it was, available for purchase. Naturally, because I have the whole series on Kindle, I checked Amazon. Volume 11 went on sale December 30th 2025! So everybody who held out even the slightest bit of hope that the series would come back, rejoice!
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Yep it's back with volume 11 released end of December and volume 12 end of March.
Hanashi's license for Fruit and Another World Survival expired because the publisher stopped responding for them to negotiate the renewal, but things are patched up and both series are back in print.
Another World Survival is complete at 8 volumes and is a pretty good gritty story of survival in an unsafe isekai world. There's even a logical explanation for the game-like stats and magic system that I won't spoil.
To anyone buying AWS I'd suggest going to the Hanashi store for the DRM-free versions because Amazon made them do a weird "click a link to see this illustration" for images that had gore. Also be prepared for a couple of volumes in the middle that had a less-good translation team. After fixes those two are a bit better than Death March 23 but not great. It's back to decent translations for the later volumes. (That mess caused Hanashi to be more careful about having their own editors work with the contractors instead of trusting them too much.)
Hanashi has released a bunch of other titles over the last year including The New Gate, volume 2 will be out January 30. https://hanashi.media/
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For a moment I thought JNC decided to rescue the LN, but it's nice to see it's back being published in the west.