A moving work of exceptional scholarship, Gwangju Uprising: The Rebellion for Democracy in South Korea was commissioned in an era of rising fake news to combat false narratives that had become popular on the internet, not the least of which was the idea that the events of the Gwangju Uprising were sparked by North Korean spies and agents provocateurs.
Ying Chang Compestine wrote her first children’s novel, Revolution is Not a Dinner Party, almost two decades ago. Despite receiving notes from readers asking for more stories set in her home city of Wuhan, she just could not come up with a compelling story or relatable characters. That is, not until the Covid-19 pandemic broke out in early 2020.
2022 seems to have a been a good year for translations: fully one-half of this year’s (as always, subjective) list of books we thought worthy of particular mention were in translation in languages from Persian and Turkish to Bahasa Indonesia and Korean. The balance is shared between English fiction, poetry and non-fiction: memoir, history and art.
In 1934, tens of thousands of Communist guerillas fled Jiangxi, in an extended retreat through hazardous terrain to Shaanxi in the north, while under fire from their Nationalist enemies. The Long March, as it became to be known, helped build the legend of the Chinese Communist Party, and of its leader Mao. While on the Long March, Mao had a daughter, who was left behind to live with a local family due to the trek’s dangers. That event inspired Michael X Wang’s debut novel Lost in the Long March, about one couple who faced a similar decision—whether to leave their child behind—and that decision’s repercussions decades later.
No Quiet Water follows 10-year-old Fumio and his family as they are forced to leave their home, farm, and their dog Flyer, while they are escorted into an internment camp. Within the harsh conditions of the camps, Fumio learns what it means to endure while discovering a new world of possibility and belonging. When waiting becomes unbearable, Flyer sets out on his own, seeking to rejoin his family.
How, as we ask every year, did Asia fare in the “Best Books” lists of 2022?
“Thou art the ruler of the minds of all people, dispenser of India’s destiny. Thy name rouses the hearts of the Punjab, Sindh, Gujarat and Maratha, of the Dravida, Orissa and Bengal.” Thus begins Rabindranath Tagore’s Jana Gana Mana. In 1939, Jawaharlal Nehru traveled to Calcutta and received Tagore’s blessing to make it India’s national anthem. That meeting took place in the home of Prasant Chandra Mahalanobis. Equal parts flawed, driven, and brilliant, Mahalanobis went on to steer the Five-Year Plans that promised to catapult India into modernity. Nikhil Menon’s new book Planning Democracy: Modern India’s Quest for Development captures this technocrat in full: how he amassed and exerted influence, and how reality fell short of his ambitions.
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 sustain meaningfully and entertainingly for nearly four hundred pages.
Cold and rainy England and Scotland exerted what now seems a surprisingly strong pull on Italian opera composers of the first part of the 19th century. Gaetano Donizetti alone had a string of four operas about the Tudors, starting with Elisabetta al castello di Kenilworth and quickly followed by Anna Bolena, Maria Stuarda and finally Roberto Devereux.
An eye-opening and soul-nourishing journey through Chinese food around the world. From Cape Town, South Africa, to small-town Saskatchewan, family-run Chinese restaurants are global icons of immigration, community and delicious food. The cultural outposts of far-flung settlers, bringers of dim sum, Peking duck and creative culinary hybrids, Chinese restaurants are a microcosm of greater social forces. They are an insight into time, history, and place.
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