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.
How, as we ask every year, did Asia fare in the “Best Books” lists of 2025?
Genpei Akasegawa (whose given name was Katsuhiko Akasegawa) was already famous as Neo-Dadaist artist when he began writing under the name of Katsuhiko Otsuji, and he soon proved himself able to work fruitfully in both domains, earning numerous awards. I Guess All We Have Is Freedom, beautifully translated by Matt Fargo, brings together five of Akasegawa’s short stories, some of them award winners, and all of which follow a narrator (presumably modeled on the author himself) through seemingly banal adventures as a father, professor, and denizen of Tokyo.
“The story here,” Indian Dalit author Kalyani Thakur Charal writes in the introduction to Andhar Bil, “centres round my village, my childhood, my beloved Andhar Bil which has a close, intimate relationship not only with me but also with numerous boys and girls of my village.” Drawing on her lived experience of loss, uprooting, and resettlement in the aftermath of the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, the novella emerges from Charal’s intimate attachment to place and memory.
Back in the (pre-EU) day, the American Government and US corporations would place Greece into a Middle Eastern or Near Eastern department; I seem to recall my 1980s-era employer doing so, to the (mild) annoyance of its Greek distributor. Europe was more tightly-defined in those days.
With A Guardian and a Thief, Megha Majumdar seems to avoid the dreaded “sophomore slump”. Her well-received debut, A Burning, published during the first year of the pandemic, was nominated for a National Book Award. Her second had done even better: a finalist (among other acclaim) in the National Book Awards this year. The novel is short, yet packed with mystery, intrigue, and a warning or two about global warming, income disparity and xenophobia.
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