New Book Announcement: “The Memory Tree” (Series) by Veena Naravane

The Memory Tree (Series), Veena Naravane (Bare Bones, January 2026)

The author, a former president of Army Women’s Welfare Association in India, explores the layered nature of grief in military families, especially for children, through The Memory Tree, a three-book series for ages 5–13. Designed to support children who have lost a parent in the uniformed services, the series employs twelve short stories and related activities to offer comfort, hope, and resilience—helping young readers, and the adults around them, navigate healing, remembrance, and an enduring sense of love.

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New Book Announcement: “Taiwanese Face, Chinese Masks: Yang Mu and His Postcolonial Poetry” by Wen-chi Li

Taiwanese Face, Chinese Masks: Yang Mu and His Postcolonial Poetry, Wen-chi Li (Cambria, February 2026)

This groundbreaking study examines the poetry of Yang Mu, a pivotal Taiwanese writer who used Chinese literary forms to challenge Sinocentric narratives during Taiwan’s White Terror and democratization. Drawing on postcolonial theory and close reading, it explores his poetic use of ambivalence, mimicry, and minor narrative to resist cultural hegemony and reclaim historical memory.

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“Railsong” by Rahul Bhattacharya

Few institutions in India have shaped the imagination of the nation as profoundly as the railways. Rahul Bhattacharya’s Railsong places this vast network of tracks, workshops, stations and employees at the centre of a sweeping narrative that follows one woman’s life alongside the evolving story of modern India. Moving from the decades after Independence to the politically charged early 1990s, the novel traces how personal journeys and national history travel along the same lines.

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“Island at the Edge of the World” by Mike Pitts

The story of Rapa Nui, better known as Easter Island, contains all the irresistibly exotic ingredients of a compelling story: Thor Heyerdahl’s daring voyages, mystical origin myths, Spanish conquistadores, scholarly rivalries, rumours of ritualised sexuality, and the brooding presence of monumental stone statues. For two centuries these ingredients have fed an extraordinary range of theories, speculations, and fantasies about one of the world’s most isolated islands.

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“Safe Passage: The Untold Story of Diplomatic Intrigue, Betrayal, and the Exchange of American and Japanese Civilians by Sea During World War II” by Evelyn Iritani

Diplomats, soldiers, and spies tend to take centre stage in stories of war, as author and former journalist Evelyn Iritani writes in her history of the United States and Japan in the Second World War. In this book, the author tells a tale of civilians, rather than one of military men, a tale of victims, rather than one of perpetrators.

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“The Tree Within: The Mexican Nobel Laureate writer Octavio Paz’s Years in India” by Indranil Chakravarty

It seems that the Nobel Prize-winning Octavio Paz was  “obsessed with the idea of the Other as not an external entity but a tree within”. Borrowing the phrase for the title of his new book, Indranil Chakravarty generously explores and develops this point, presenting his readers with different trees in different spaces, including Paz’s own neem tree in the inner garden of his home during his sojourn in India in the 1960s.

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