A Korean novel, beautifully translated, in which an unexpected pregnancy forces two sisters to confront the legacy of their own mother's neglect. Delicate, sad, a little dreamy.
The author has been travelling in China for 30 years. This is her first book, and it is a compelling portrait of the country's culture and its recent mutations.
Vintage Japanese crime fiction, by a master of the genre, first published in 1950: the head of a clan leaves a very peculiar will, and its reading is followed by a series of unusual murders.
This is the first publication of Hugh Trevor-Roper's private journal of his visit to the People's Republic of China in 1965, shortly before the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. It also d... read more
A memoir of youth in Henan province and the liberating power of the pen, by a prolific Chinese writer still relatively little known in this country, despite a festoon of international prizes... read more
A superb account of how European imperialism in Asia was undermined by a network of ingenious radicals, who used printing presses, global travel and the colonisers' languages to spread their... read more
Takes the reader from the earliest written accounts to the present in vivid portraits. The empress Masako is there, and presumably princess Murasaki Shikibu, whose diary is not only fascina... read more
A first collection by an Afghan poet, born in Kabul in 1990 and now a don at Peterhouse, Cambridge. Highly literate yet drawing on the story-telling traditions of her youth, Fayyaz tells of ... read more
A narrative account of the rise of the Asian city state by the FT's former Singapore correspondent, exploring both its extraordinary economic development and the authoritarian bent of its le... read more
The grandmother in question was Vietnamese, and exiled in the Vietnam war. A good-looking book on this healthy and nourishing cuisine. Has Ducasse's imprimatur so should be excellent.
Contemporary short fiction from Afghanistan, all written before the Taliban retook power in August 2021. An extraordinary collection brought into being through the efforts of UNTOLD's Write ... read more
A strange and magical memoir of growing up in prosaic England with Anglo-Burmese parentage. Teak trees interweave oaks; myth and imagery chase each other through the author's odyssey through... read more
Culinary archaeology following the trails of ancient maritime trade through Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, Iran and the Emirates. Transporting stuff.
The Great Game has not changed though the players have: Keay looks at the history of this contested and remote area and at those that have roamed its wildernesses.
Ressa, CEO of the Phillipine's top digital news site, jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for her efforts to "safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and... read more
From the author of the best book on Dreyfus, this is a biography of the Indian monk who inspired Freud, Gandhi, and Tagore and introduced Westerners to yoga and the Vedanta.
The tricky business of merging the inner world with the outer - a balancing act that the generous Iyer has been practising for decades now, in Tibet, Japan, Korea, Iran and elsewhere.
Somerset Maugham appears as one of two narrators in this atmospheric novel of love, truth, secrecy and betrayal in 1920s' colonial Penang. Eng's airy storytelling is a rare gift: he gives hi... read more