In Kathryn Ma’s new novel, a young man from Yunnan who has given himself the name of Shelley—as in the poet—has developed a term to describe a “belief in the unspoken bonds between countrymen that transcend time and borders”. It gives its name to the book, The Chinese Groove, which starts out in a small…
Three years ago, Deepti Kapoor’s Indian crime trilogy went through a bidding war, not just for the books—including translations in fifteen languages—but also for Hollywood film rights. As unusual as crime blockbusters set in India may be, Age of Vice, the first book in the trilogy, has catapulted Kapoor into the running for the hottest…
Author Kyla Zhao got her start in publishing at the age of sixteen writing for the Singapore editions of prominent glossy magazines penning wedding articles for Harper’s Bazaar, then went on to Tatler and Vogue. She centers her debut novel, The Fraud Squad, in the world of Singapore glossies with a Pygmalion twist. The story…
Amado V Hernandez’s The Preying Birds (Mga Ibong Mandaragit, first published in 1969) is a classic of modern Filipino literature and, according to translator Danton Remoto, a required text in Filipino schools. That it is only just now appearing in an international English-language edition is something of a surprise.
Coming from a literary family, Hajra Masroor and her sister Khadija have been referred to as the Brontë sisters of Urdu fiction. While Khadija was known for her novels, Hajra was a writer of short fiction and plays. A new translation of a collection of Hajra Masroor’s work, The Monkey’s Wound and Other Stories, by…
The two novellas in Shivani Sivagurunathan’s What Has Happened to Harry Pillai? take place on the fictional Coal Island in Malaysia, a setting she has used previously in a couple of other books going back a decade. Much lurks under the surface of this seemingly idyllic locale. In this latest book, each novella takes on…
A literature-focused coming-of-age story reminiscent of Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, George Lee’s debut novel, Dancing in the River, chronicles the formative years of a boy named Little Bright who grows up during the Cultural Revolution in the Hubei countryside near the Yangtze River.
Yoko Tawada is a compelling, prolific, and award-winning writer working in Japanese, German, and English. Three Streets is her most recent collection published in English, here not so much short stories as they are strolls through three streets in Berlin. Throughout her works, her narrators are often strangers in a strange land, living in between…
A dead person who addresses himself in the second person “you” for the entirety of the novel is the narrator of Shehan Karunatilaka’s 2022 Booker Prize winning novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. This, in itself, is a striking fact about this novel as the second person pronoun is a difficult narrative voice to…
Seishu Hase’s The Boy and the Dog opens with Kazumasa Nakagasi. He finds an emaciated dog outside a convenience store. The dog is wearing a tag engraved with his name, Tamon, short for Tamonten. Tamonten is one of four guardian deities of Buddha’s realm. The dog Tamon becomes a guardian for the people he encounters…
The narrator of Kim Hye-jin’s Concerning My Daughter believes that “some things aren’t spoken out loud.” As she ages, she doesn’t want to discuss the lack of facilities willing to care for the elderly. And as a mother, she doesn’t want to talk about her adult daughter, who doesn’t have stable employment and is involved…
In Preeta Samarasan’s new novel, Tale of the Dreamer’s Son, the caretaker of a commune in Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands states that “some nations were sending people to outer space while our countrymen were busy butchering each other.” Mrs Arasu, the caretaker in question, was referring to the 1969 race riots in Malaysia, namely the May…
Whether Jeremy Tiang chooses the books to translate or the books choose him, his name on the cover nigh guarantees that the novel is extremely good, remarkable or, in the case of Zhang Yueran’s Cocoon, a triumph.
At first glance, Lawrence Osborne’s latest novel, On Java Road, seems to focus on the 2019 political climate in Hong Kong, but it soon becomes apparent that this serves more as a setting for what is a story of friendship, betrayal and, perhaps, redemption. The book, indeed, could possibly have been set at any time…
Power corrupts, so the saying goes. Award-winning author Li Peifu suggests there is more to it than that in his novel A Man of the Plains, now translated into English by James Trapp and retitled Graft.