“The goal of this book”, writes Rian Thum in his introduction, “is to reach an understanding of Islamic Chinese history that makes the Muslims of China unsurprising, even ordinary.” The layman who has visited, say, Xi’an, might be surprised that this should be deemed necessary.
On 9 August 1965, Singapore was expelled from Malaysia, which had itself only become an independent country two years earlier. But Malaysia insisted that Malaysian troops be permitted to remain in Singapore. Singapore’s future Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew later said that Malaysia’s insistence “stiffened our resolve” to “build up the Singapore Armed Forces”. The person primarily responsible for doing that is the subject of Ramachandran Menon’s new book Kirpa Ram Vij: The Volunteer Who Launched an Army.
In Tokyo’s Himonya district lives Kaede’s grandfather, a former school principal with a love of mystery novels that he has passed down to his granddaughter.
For New Year’s Day, we re-broadcast a podcast with Kerry Brown, now Chairman of the Royal Society of Asian Affairs. In the 16th century, Queen Elizabeth I tried to send several letters to her Chinese counterpart, the Wan Li Emperor. The letters tried to ask the Ming emperor to conduct trade relations with faraway England; none of the expeditions carrying the letters ever arrived. It’s an inauspicious beginning to the four centuries of foreign relations between China and what eventually became Britain, covered by Kerry Brown in his latest book The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for Power.
A 2025 round-up of reviews of 79 works in translation from Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Thai through Bengali, Malayalam and Hindi to Arabic, Yazidi, Kyrghyz and French: fiction, poetry, non-fiction, children’s books and classics.
Due, one presumes, to the success of his first photo-album matching images of yesteryear with their current appearance, Macau-based photographer Gonçalo Lobo Pinheiro has returned with an encore.
2025 was another full year of Asian Review of Books / New Books Network podcasts. Here is a selection of a dozen fiction and non-fiction highlights covering Ancient Mesopotamia to contemporary Korea and everywhere (and every period) in-between.
Elisa Shua Dusapin’s debut novel, Winter in Sokcho, won a National Book Award, among others. It was set in South Korea, while her next two novels were respectively set in Japan and Russia. Of Franco-Swiss and Korean heritage, Dusapin has crafted her fourth and most recent novel, The Old Fire, as a homecoming of sorts: she’s turned to her birthplace in the Dordogne. Aneesa Abbas Higgins, who had worked with Dusapin on her previous three books, has communicated Dusapin’s latest with this tender, melancholic and evocative translation.
This entirely subjective list of 45 highlights from 2025 include reviews of fiction, literature, poetry and non-fiction. Translations remained strong in this year’s list, including literature, poetry and non-fiction, ranging from Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Hindi and Kyrgyz. Non-fiction entries range from history, memoir and essays to art and literature. (The year in question refers to the date of review, not of publication.)
Caste has been a huge topic of conversation in modern India. Yet debates and activism around caste discrimination have spread beyond South Asia. Caste activists looked to African-American literature and leaders to connect their fight with the battle against racism in the U.S. And as Indians moved around the world—to America, to elsewhere in Asia, and to the Middle East—they way they thought about caste changed.
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