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1
The borrowed (2016)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
Detective Kwan Chun-dok’s career unfolds across six Hong Kong cases, working backward from 2013 to 1967. Seeing the practiced detective before the beginner makes each earlier case a chance to rethink what you know about him. Start with Jeremy Tiang’s translation if you want a puzzle novel with the history of a police force built into its structure.
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Notes of a crocodile (2017)
10.0/10on Open Library
Published
Lazi falls for Shui Ling in late-1980s Taipei and finds company among other queer students. The novel moves between diary fragments, vignettes, and satire as Lazi tries to understand the terms of that company. Bonnie Huie’s translation is the pick for readers who like a coming-of-age story that can change form in the middle of a thought.
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Lake Like a Mirror (2019)
7.0/10on Open Library
Published
An unlicensed hair salon and a hotel with forgetful guests belong to the same quietly unnerving Malaysia in these short stories. Ho lets the ordinary places stay familiar even when strange details slip in. Try Natascha Bruce’s translation for short fiction that makes gossip or an evasive conversation feel as consequential as a ghost.
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The Invisibility Cloak (2017)
Published
Cui scrapes by building custom amplifiers for rich customers while his own place in Beijing grows precarious. Ge Fei is sharp about the difference between having exacting tastes and having the money to indulge them. Canaan Morse translates this short novel for anyone who likes satire in which the main character gets to have an obsession of his own.
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The Man with the Compound Eyes: A Novel (2014)
Published
A floating mass of trash hits Taiwan’s coast, bringing together a young man from an invented island and a woman who lives by the sea. Their story shares space with other lives the disaster touches. Darryl Sterk’s translation is a good entry point if you want environmental fiction that lets a mythic island and a recognizable coastline occupy the same book.
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My city (1993)
Published
Xi Xi writes about teenagers in 1970s Hong Kong in language that makes their daily surroundings feel newly strange. It’s a good place to start if you want a city novel that sounds curious and playful. Eva Hung’s English translation follows the shorter first edition.
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Taipei People (2017)
Published
In these fourteen stories, people who came from mainland China after 1949 carry old attachments into new lives in Taipei. Read two or three together and see how differently memory works depending on who is doing the remembering. The English edition was translated by Pai Hsien-Yung and Patia Yasin and edited by George Kao.
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Age of Goodbyes (2022)
Published
A story about Du Li An after Malaysia’s 1969 riots shares space with a critic’s account of a novelist who wrote about her. Another voice keeps tugging at the edges. Choose YZ Chin’s translation if you enjoy novels in which even the question of who gets to write a family’s history becomes part of the story.
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The Last Quarter of the Moon (2013)
Published
An Evenki woman in northeastern China recalls a life spent amid reindeer herding, ice fishing, and family changes. Bruce Humes translates a novel that lets the memory of ordinary seasonal work set the pace through upheavals. Choose it if you want a broad sweep of time told in the scale of a single life.
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Atlas (2012)
10.0/10on Open Library
Published
Future archaeologists piece together an imaginary Hong Kong through maps, street names, and objects. Try the “Streets” section if you want the pleasure of opening a city novel anywhere and finding another version of the place. Dung Kai-cheung shares the translation credit with Anders Hansson and Bonnie S. McDougall.
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Love in a fallen city (1985)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
Start with the title novella, in which a divorced woman’s search for security takes her from Shanghai to wartime Hong Kong. Chang gives a courtship the suspense of a negotiation, where an offer can tell you more than a declaration. This collection credits Karen S. Kingsbury and Chang for its English translations.
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Taiwan Travelogue (2024)
9.0/10on Open Library
Published
A Japanese writer and her Taiwanese interpreter travel by train and eat their way through Taiwan under Japanese rule. The book presents their story as a rediscovered Japanese travelogue, although Yáng wrote the novel in Mandarin. Choose Lin King’s translation if you want to see intimacy and differences in power come through over the same meal.
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Faraway (2021)
Published
A Taiwanese son goes to mainland China to bring home his father, who has suffered a stroke. Hospital regulations and relatives he barely knows keep him there. Read Jeremy Tiang’s translation for a novel of family history in which the institutions a son has to navigate make an old division newly immediate.
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My South Seas Sleeping Beauty (2007)
Published
Su Qi’s memories circle a sister’s death, the forests of Borneo, and a move to Taiwan. The echoes of Sleeping Beauty belong to a book that lets family stories shade into myth. Go with Valerie Jaffee’s translation when you’re in the mood for a coming-of-age novel you have to piece together as you go.
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Delicious Hunger (2024)
Published
Singaporean writer Hai Fan follows people in the Malayan guerrilla movement through the moments when they’re trying to eat or find the nerve to speak to each other. One character improvises cakes from cassava. Jeremy Tiang translates a collection in which an ordinary appetite can fill more of a story than a battle.
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Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China (2009)
Published
Ah-Q has a gift for talking himself into believing he’s won. Try the title story for the quick turn in Lu Xun’s satire from a man’s private evasions to the behavior of the people around him. Julia Lovell’s translation also includes “Diary of a Madman,” which uses a very different kind of unreliable thinking.
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