In 1722, a war band of grizzled Afghans battled their way from Kandahar to Esfahan and, after a grim siege, overthrew the 200-year-old Safavid dynasty. For the next 70 years, Iran suffered from non-stop civil and foreign wars. Not until the Qajar dynasty took control did the exhausted and impoverished country know some measure of…
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…
Approaching the Buddha: Transmission and Transformation, is based on the Xuzhou Collection, a dazzling array of ceremonial objects assembled by an anonymous collector and housed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. For students of the dharma, these images are alive, living transmissions rather than decorative relics. That collector, whose identity is withheld throughout,…
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…
Walking through Siberia in the dead of winter may not, on the face of it, sound like a very good idea, yet that is what Charlie Walker intended to do in February 2022. Yakutsk is built on the banks of the Lena River and I would ski-trek northwards along the water’s frozen surface for 1,000…
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…
A New York Times headline from late February read “Cambodia Celebrates the Return of Looted Artifacts From a Tainted Dealer”. It wasn’t front-page news, and readers may have missed the connection to previous scandals involving such storied institutions as New York’s Metropolitan Museum, the Smithsonian, the Denver Art Museum, Sotheby’s and Spinks, all of whom…
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…
That the US is “imperialistic”, if not necessarily “imperial”, has been a point of political rhetoric my entire life. That, however, the US constitutes and maintains an actual empire is an idea of somewhat more recent vintage; whether or not Daniel Immerwahr was the first to make the point in How to Hide an Empire:…
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…