Meddy Chan works for her family’s event company, which specializes in wedding services like hair styling, make-up, cakes, flowers, musical entertainment, and photography. For the upcoming Tom Cruise Sutopo / Jacqueline Wijaya wedding, Meddy also provides a dead body. Jesse Q Sutanto’s entertaining new novel, Dial A For Aunties, brings to mind the movies Weekend…
In 1929, a young woman sailed from Manila to New York to reunite with an older man who begged her to join him in the United States. Twenty years old at the most—her actual birth year was never clear—she was born from a Filipina mother and a former American soldier previously stationed in the Philippines….
When Shek Yang was a little girl at the end of the 1700s along what came to be known as the “China Coast”, she lost her mother and newborn brother within hours. To make up for the loss of his son, her father trained Shek Yang in sailing, fishing and other seafaring skills. But he…
Hilary Byrd is a depressed and disgruntled English librarian from Petts Wood in southeast London. Frustrated with the changes in his library over the past twenty years—digitalization and moms’ groups that take the focus away from print books and exacerbate his depression—he plans a trip overseas to clear his mind and to show himself and…
William Gross (or Grose) was a 19th-century African-American pioneer and hotelier in Seattle that caught the attention of author Amy Sommers. She bases her novel Rumors from Shanghai on a fictional grandson, Tolt Gross, a young lawyer who moves to Shanghai and soon after learns of Japan’s plans to bomb Pearl Harbor.
Crystal Z Lee’s debut novel, Love and Other Moods, begins—as one does—with a lavish wedding à la Crazy Rich Asians. Chinese-American Joss Kong is marrying ultra-wealthy Tay Kai Tang at a swanky Shanghai hotel with an audience of friends and family that speak a variety of Chinese dialects and English with a variety of accents….
After a yoga retreat from hell somewhere between Shenzhen and Dongguan, twenty-year-old Tiller Bardmon meets single mother Val and her eight-year old son, Victor Jr at the Hong Kong International Airport’s food court. Val and her son are returning to the United States after visiting her family in Kowloon, yet when she tries to pay…
Once home to the cultured, artistic world of courtesans, Heera Mandi is now a crumbling red-light district in Lahore. Raina is a young tour guide committed to fighting the injustice and violence now endemic there. But she’s part of the world she’s fighting: her mother Jahaan-e-Rumi works there; her father, Sherji, manages her mother’s career…
Newcomers to Jakarta are wont to complain about the heat and rain. Pallavi Aiyar’s new novel, Jakarta Tails, begins as one of the protagonists gripes about the thunder and lightning that have sent him under the bed for cover. Not unusual, then, except that the two main characters are a couple of house cats.
Readers of the Asian Review of Books may have noticed an increasing number of young adult (YA) books among its reviews. This is in part a function of increased coverage, but it’s also a result of there being more books to cover. As a genre, Asian YA has grown in both depth and breadth, a…
A hero in Japan, Beate Sirota is hardly a household name in her home country of the United States. Jeff Gottesfeld’s No Steps Behind: Beate Sirota Gordon’s Battle for Women’s Rights in Japan is a new picture book illustrated by Sheilla Witanto that tells Beate’s story and how she brought change to Japan after World…
Two young women fall from a Bombay clocktower, twenty feet and minutes apart. It’s 1892 and the women are sisters-in-law in a prominent Bombay Parsee family. No reliable witnesses are found, but some bystanders saw a skirmish between three men just around the time the women fell to their deaths. This is how Nev March’s…
While Asian protagonists are no longer rare in young adult fiction, some cultures seem more prevalent in the genre than others. Think Jenny Han’s books and the various K-Pop stories, as well as Taiwanese-American stories like Loveboat Taipei and Rent a Boyfriend. In an apparent first, Loan Le’s debut novel, A Pho Love Story, adds…
It’s been just about a year since international travel all but came to a standstill, so it could either feel timely or insidious to be presented with a new book of short stories set across East Asia, the Pacific, and Europe, several of which feature travelers. Simon Rowe’s latest collection, Pearl City: Stories from Japan…
The volcanic Jeju Island is now a popular honeymoon destination in South Korea, but has a darker history that has only relatively recently begun to be openly discussed: a little over seventy years ago it was the scene of a massacre. Residents of Jeju had been some of the most ardent resisters of Japanese rule…