In 18th-century China, young aristocrat Baoyu—born with a jade pendant foretelling his fate—grapples with love, loss, and identity amid the grandeur and constraints of his powerful family. Torn between his cousin Daiyu and his devoted maid Amber, Baoyu’s privileged world unravels through tragedy, betrayal, and the crushing weight of expectation. Seeking freedom from duty and despair, he embarks on a spiritual quest shaped by Taoist and Buddhist wisdom.
A nascent media mogul battling for political survival, a love triangle fractured by the SARS pandemic, the ruthless choreography of Shanghai’s social scene—each story in Chinese on the Beach explores the particular madness of living through history, when old rules dissolved overnight and new ones hadn’t yet formed.
Mount Fuji is everywhere recognized as a wonder of nature and enduring symbol of Japan. Yet behind the picture-postcard image is a history filled with conflict and upheaval. Violent eruptions across the centuries wrought havoc and instilled fear. Long an object of worship, Fuji has been inhabited by deities that changed radically over time. It has been both a totem of national unity and a flashpoint for economic and political disputes. And while its soaring majesty has inspired countless works of literature and art, the foot of the mountain is home to military training grounds and polluting industries. Tracing the history of Fuji from its geological origins in the remote past to its recent inscription as a World Heritage Site, Andrew Bernstein explores these and other contradictions in the story of the mountain, inviting us to reflect on the relationships we share with the nonhuman world and one another.
“All points on a circle are always the same distance from the center.” These exquisite personal essays trace the orbit of Pakistani-American author Samina Najmi as she reflects on events, people, and places that shape her traditional childhood in Pakistan and continue to inspire her as she pursues her dreams of education and travel, enlarging her vision and experience of the world.
After learning of his wife’s affair with his best friend and business partner, divorced and unemployed MindTech entrepreneur Dr Harry Coulson arrives in the idyllic English town of Freebourne, looking to start a new life. But any hopes of quietly picking up the pieces of his broken world are shattered when he steps off the train to discover the body of a young woman lying in the snow. It’s almost as if she’d been left there for him to find.
A compilation of reviews in the past twelve months for Women in Translation month (August 2025), including non-fiction and poetry and well as novels, short stories and children’s books. These include translations from Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Sumerian, Bengali, Kannada, Hindi, German, Vietnamese, Thai and Kurmanji.
Keru Cai’s Poverty in Modern Chinese Realism examines the ways in which early 20th-century Chinese writers drew upon Russian works about the socially downtrodden to describe poverty, in a bid to enrich Chinese culture by creating a syncretic new realism. Modern Chinese realist writers turned to the topic of material poverty—peasants suffering from famine, exploited urban laborers, homeless orphans—to convey their sense of textual poverty and national backwardness.
This book tells the inside story of how Singapore defied considerable odds to develop a dynamic economy and cohesive society in the 60 years since the city-state’s independence.
Through in-depth interviews with some of the nation’s most influential leaders—Abdullah Tarmugi, Chan Sek Keong, Cheong Koon Hean, Halimah Yacob, Peter Ho, Khaw Boon Wan, Lim Siong Guan, Ravi Menon, Seah Jiak Choo, Tan Yong Soon, Eddie Teo, Teo Ming Kian—How Singapore Beat the Odds explores various facets of public policy that shaped Singapore’s remarkable transformation.
A deeply moving and often hilarious new novel by the author of The Wangs vs The World following a woman who becomes an internet folk hero in the most unexpected way, catapulting her into fame and influence just as she’s finally beginning to reckon with her complicated past.
The poet in Brown God’s Child makes no bones about laying bare the cultural rooting of her identity in the very first poem of the volume. Be it through “burnt caramel”, the colour of her God’s skin or the sounds of her language—half Sanskrit and half Dravidian—poet Smitha Sehgal makes her entry as a formidable voice.
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