When Dawn Chin is assigned a high school history project to interview a family member, she picks her paternal grandmother and learns more about her family history than she expected, including a couple of life-altering secrets. All the lies, all the secrets, the masks her family wears, the ones she puts on too, like a…
In 1958, a Kashmiri poet who earned his living cutting timber sat down in front of a radio microphone and stumbled over a verse from a printed edition of his own work. His name was Samad Mir, and he was one of the best-loved mystic poets of his day. His interviewers were JL Kaul, a…
It’s not hard to picture the leap Monona Wali made from filmmaker to writer after reading her latest novel, Sutra Americana, a cinematic story of an Indian family that immigrated to the United States in the early 1960s. Continuing well into the 2000s, the story is at heart about how long it can take for…
In modern day Rampur, aspiring writer Rukmini finds herself fascinated by the life of Munni Bai Hijab: the real-life 19th-century courtesan and poet whose voice and achievements were eclipsed by her love affair with and role as muse to the great Urdu poet Dagh Delvi. As Rukmini begins researching and transcribing Hijab’s untold story, she…
Usha and her husband Om are part of a Gujarati community in Coimbatore and the parents of three grown children: sons Ashmit and Romit and a daughter named Pari. Om is co-owner of a textile store and takes his role seriously as head of his household even though all three children have moved out. As…
Rosa Kwon Easton’s debut novel, White Mulberry, tells the story of Miyoung, a Korean nurse who passes as Japanese while living and working in Japan as World War II erupts. In that book, Miyoung learns to do whatever she can to protect herself from danger. In the newly-published sequel Red Seal, which takes place across…
Lebanese novelist and poet Rashid El-Daif is one of the leading voices in contemporary Arabic literature, perhaps best known in English for Dear Mr Kawabata (1995) which addresses the aftermath of the Lebanese Civil War. His most recently translated work, Paving the Sea (originally written in 2011), satirizes the aspiration for Western liberalism and nationalism,…
At the center of Kersi Khambatta’s Bombay Tabloid is Cyrus Kerman, the son of an Iran-born bakery owner, and his lifelong entanglement with Devika Wright, a beautiful Anglo-Indian dancer and model who later becomes a lawyer. Cyrus falls in love with her twice. Their story unfolds between two traumatic periods in the city’s history. The…
A border is usually imagined as a line on a map. In Absolute Jafar, Sarnath Banerjee shows how that line can enter a marriage, a family and even a child’s idea of home. His sixth graphic novel follows Brighu Sen, an Indian man who falls in love with a Pakistani artist, marries her, moves to…
The winner of the 2026 International Booker Prize (and the 2024 US National Book Award for Translated Literature) is a piece of faux Japanese travel-writing, framed with an equally faux publication history. Aoyama Chizuko, an entirely fictional Japanese writer, travels to Japanese-occupied Taiwan in 1938 on an official lecture tour. After the War, her contemporaneous…
A prestigious IT company sets six job finalists, all fresh out of university, an unusual task: through a group discussion, they have to decide who among them will get the job. If they manage to do so, the company will extend an offer to the winner. If they fail, everyone goes home empty-handed. The conversation…
Chen-Fu Hsu, a Taiwanese writer interested in bugs, photography and geography, traveled to Tibet to gain first-hand experience with snow leopards for What’s a Snow Leopard to You?, his collection of more than forty short prose pieces. The collection won the 2021 Taiwan Literature Award, an award that joins a number of others earned by…
She Walks at Night is the eighth Seishi Yokomizo mystery to be published in English since 2019 and features a cast familiar to previous readers of this popular series, which began with The Honjin Murders, published in Japan in 1946. The story brings back the eccentric private detective Kosuke Kindaichi and Inspector Isokawa, his longstanding, trusted…
In This is Where the Serpent Lives, Daniyal Mueenuddin unpacks the nuances of the Pakistani landowning class through rich, in-depth characterisation filled with complex interpersonal dynamics that shed light on the realities of class, discrimination and social mobility. Divided into four sections, each with a different narrator, the novel explores the interconnected lives of characters…
In the title story of Ysabelle Cheung’s debut story collection Patchwork Dolls, the narrator Sophia and her childhood friends sell bits of their bodies so they can pay down their student loans, start businesses and afford luxuries. Mahika had sold her deep-set eyes, her nose, her dimples, her lips; Jumana her sharp, symmetrical cheekbones; and…