The 2026 International Booker Prize-winning Taiwan Travelogue does the last item anticipated of an independently printed darling of postcolonial literature—it will get its readers to smile. The first Mandarin language novel to win the prestigious prize was born out of an epicurean method to analysis that allowed its creator to step into her protagonists’ sneakers. “Research for the novel’s central themes of travel and food changed my life in two obvious ways: my savings went down; my weight went up,” revealed novelist Yáng Shuāng-zǐ in an interview with the Booker Prize Committee.
Life’s infinitesimal pleasures are exactly what uplift this celebrated novel. “I personally dislike historical fiction that is strictly miserable,” Taiwan Travelogue’s translator Lin King mirrored in the similar interview. “These stories ring to me as untrue, because no matter how difficult times are, I believe that humans always manage to find flickers of levity and deep wells of love.” In the award-winning English adaptation, King and Yáng’s sensibilities fuse right into a voice that radiates with the small and varied joys of transferring via the world—that little feeling of triumph after nailing a last-minute journey, the hitched breath that escapes when sightseeing one thing really magnificent, and particularly the satiation that follows the nice Taiwanese pastime of consuming full and nicely.
It’s these unexpectedly enjoyable observations that act as intelligent shelter for the novel’s formidable narrative. The e-book is framed as the discovered travelogue of fictional novelist Aoyama Chizuko as she and her assigned companion-interpreter O Chizuru trek their method via a Japanese-occupied Taiwan simply earlier than the nations are cleaved in two by the Second World War. Questions of imperial energy and cultural survival are volleyed between noodle slurps, sunflower seed crunches, and savored bites of high-altitude wasabi imbued with the uncommon air of the mountain it was grown on. Whether Taiwan Travelogue compels the foodie in you to discover thanks to the many scenes of feasting seasoned all through the novel, or your interior detective is made keen to untangle its nested historic plots, the novel is filled with entry factors into early twentieth century Taiwan, then a satellite tv for pc to the Japanese empire. In different phrases, the e-book does what any nice journey story is meant to—it strips again our preconceptions of individuals and locations and faucets right into a universally human sense of curiosity.
As history-making as the novel’s International Booker Prize win is, Taiwan Travelogue belongs to a protracted line of Taiwanese literary heritage. As a Taiwanese-American myself, these are the tales I return to time and time once more to dive into the island’s wealthy cultural layers, rejoice its thrill-seeking vacationers, and naturally, relish in its nice love affair with meals. Below, 5 books to dive into as soon as you’ve got completed Yáng and King’s beautiful travelogue-within-a-novel.
Stories of the Sahara by Sanmao, translated by Mike Fu
Prior to the publication of Yáng and King’s novel, the phrases “Taiwan travelogue” used to first conjure the picture of free-spirited Taiwanese journey author Sanmao. Stories of the Sahara, her most well-known assortment of dispatches from her time residing in Western Sahara between 1974 and 1979 was translated into English by Mike Fu in 2020. If there was anybody who knew the place to discover a chortle in darkish and fraught instances, it was her, and this grouping of essays is Sanmao at her sharpest. (Read more on my own relationship with the essay collection here.)
Ghost Town by Kevin Chen, translated by Darryl Sterk
It’s your loved ones that haunts you in the finish—a conclusion you might come to by means of Freudian evaluation or plodding together with this engrossing multigenerational saga. We observe the protagonist Keith, a younger homosexual Taiwanese man who returns to his run-down hometown of Yongjing after murdering his boyfriend in Berlin. As somebody whose family hometown is about an hour’s drive from Yongjing, I can verify no different English language novel captures the basic atmosphere of a Middle Taiwanese small-town fairly so precisely—down to the hacked up betel nut cud on the streets and gloopy mounds of bah-uân served from each different avenue stall.
Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin, translated by Bonnie Huie
This seminal work of lesbian literature is the origin of the phrases “crocodile” and “Lazi,” which Taiwan’s sapphic neighborhood has claimed as their very own phrases. The former phrase is a working metaphor all through the e-book, which describes how same-sex attraction is pressured underneath the floor in heteronormative society. Taking place in late Nineteen Eighties, post-White Terror (the second longest interval of martial regulation in the world) Taiwan, Notes of a Crocodile reads as a sequence of notebooks, most of which come from a school pupil named Lazi in Taipei whose sexual awakening is denied the standard shops and marriage plot afforded to most literary ingenues. While much less gustatory in its delights than Taiwan Travelogue, Qiu Miaojin’s magnum opus takes pleasure as a politically vital act.
The Man With the Compound Eyes by Wu Ming-yi, translated by Darryl Sterk
A grieving professor and teenager from an uncontacted Indigenous neighborhood from the fictional Pacific island of Wayo Wayo are introduced collectively when a trash vortex, a damaging man-made island of rubbish coalesced by ocean currents, adjustments life on the island perpetually. An ecological tragedy that stares unflinchingly at local weather change’s unrelenting march, this devastating novel floats on its sense of humanity and our intuition to dwell for our family members.
The Boy From Clearwater: Book 1 by Yu Pei-Yun, Illustrated by Zhou Jian-Xin, Translated by Lin King
The Kuomintang, in any other case generally known as the Chinese Nationalist Party, arrested Tsai Kun-lin in 1950 for his affiliation with a “left-leaning” studying group in highschool. From his time as a prisoner in a labor camp on Green Island to the island’s transition to a full democracy, Tsai beared shut witness to Taiwan’s trendy metamorphosis, and The Boy From Clearwater is a gorgeously illustrated graphic biography that brings his story to life. Another Lin King translation—the first two volumes had been printed in 2023 and 2024—this ongoing 4 e-book sequence traces the arc from the island’s most intense interval of oppression to its development in direction of reform.