The Young Die Old is Nguyễn Bình Phương second novel and was published in 1994 to great acclaim in his homeland where it is considered a modern classic. After having been previously published in French and Korean, it is now also available in English, translated by Khải Q Nguyễn. The novel marks a radical departure…
French literature has had an outsized influence on Italian opera. Rigoletto, Manon Lescaut, La traviata, Tosca, L’elisir d’amore, La bohème and even Turandot all have French antecedents. Less well appreciated is that Giacomo Puccini’s iconic Madama Butterfly is ultimately, if indirectly, derived from a now obscure French novel. Pierre Loti’s 1887 Madame Chrysanthème—-just released in…
Anthologists are wont to label their collections “the best” or “the greatest”. In The Best of Urdu Short Stories, Mehr Afshan Farooqi does the same. With the focus on the a particular genre, called afsana or kahani in Urdu, she puts her spin on “best” by bringing together new writers along with the canonical Saadat…
Nahai, who hails from Iranian Kurdistan, is regarded as one of the leading contemporary novelists writing in Kurdish. Birds in a Gale, originally published in 2002 and set in the Iran of the 1990s to consider the aftermath of the Iranian revolution of 1979, is one of his most celebrated novels and demonstrates both his…
Osamu Dazai’s Good-Bye is a collection of short stories picked from different stages of his career, most of which have been translated into English for the first time. The final story, which shares the title of the book, was Dazai’s last work before he committed suicide, and remained an unfinished novella at the time of…
Shah Rukh Khan is such a well-known Indian actor that his name is likely to be recognized even by people who are not devotees of Bollywood films. Lavanya Lakshmi pays homage to a 1995 Shah Rukh Khan film, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (or DDLJ as she has it), in her debut novel, Leave and Come…
At first, Cho Yeeun’s Shift, recently translated by Yewon Jung, might be mistaken for a straight-up detective novel. Yi Chang, a police officer in a small seaside town, is searching for the leader of a mysterious cult, who claims to be able to cure any disease with his magical powers, in the hope of saving…
Tom Lin’s debut novel, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, paid homage to the American Western, with a Chinese twist, and his lyrical writing style is well suited to the cowboy culture of the American Wild West. He’s back with Babylon, South Dakota, a novel just as colourful as his first. Where his first novel…
A teenage boy goes to a concert of his favourite rock band with his father only to become a victim of mass shooting. In a parallel lifetime, he returns from the concert completely unharmed while his father suffers life-altering injuries. Which of these two versions of their lives is “true”? Swell, Son Bo-mi’s collection of…
Karl Marx famously argued that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Fahmida Riaz’s Fortress of the Forgotten Ones, a historical novel set in 5th-century Ctesiphon, capital of the Persian Sasanian empire at its zenith, shows that this struggle existed long before its appearance in The Communist Manifesto. The…
While it can certainly be awkward for book reviewers to meet authors after having panned their books, these are not usually life-altering experiences. But the same cannot be said for the protagonist in Zen Cho’s novella, The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo, a lighthearted story which nevertheless in many respects brings to mind Eileen Chang’s…
Rich in detail and the range of characters it features, The Unrepentant is as an impressive collection of 14 short stories that sheds light on the diversity of life and experiences in the Malay peninsula and Singapore during and in the aftermath of the Malayan Emergency (1948-1960), in which the communist pro-independence movement conducted guerilla…
Chen Munian is not a murderer. Yet who is he accused of murdering? Why can he not shake off the accusation? These questions, otherwise central in a book initially presented as a murder mystery, unravel in Xu Zechen’s Night Train. The novel begins with Munian working as a gardener at a unaccredited institute of higher…
Rat Race is a slice-of-life story following characters in a modern, capitalistic India as they balance the demands of ambition and family. While originally written by Mamta Kalia in Hindi as Daud at the turn of the millennium, and possibly qualifying as a “modern classic”, Jerry Pinto’s 2026 translation still aptly encapsulates many elements of…
In 2006, Mohamed Mansi Qandil won one of Egypt’s most prestigious literary prizes, the Sawiris Cultural Award, with his breakthrough novel, Moon over Samarqand. In 2010 A Cloudy Day on the Western Shore was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. His latest novel, The Country Doctor’s Tale, has now been made available in…