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Taiwanese Books to Read: Fiction, Memoir & Literature in Translation
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items Taiwanese novels, short stories, memoirs and literary works in English translation - from Taipei and island memory to Indigenous writing, queer fiction, family history and the White Terror. A reading list for anyone who wants to discover Taiwan beyon...
Sections
2
Books
Follow the rabbit hole → Read a free excerpt / Watch the adaptation / Meet the translator / Explore the place.
Books
My personal favorite - and one of the books that feels most unmistakably Taiwanese to me. Mountains, climbing, Indigenous stories, ghosts, strange landscapes and the sense that the island itself is alive and remembering.
The Man with the Compound Eyes
One of the best places to start with contemporary Taiwanese literature in translation — food, travel, desire, colonial history and two women trying to understand each other across language and power. It feels intimate and political at the same time.
Taiwan Travelogue (National Book Award Winner)
Another Wu Ming-Yi I’d absolutely include — a missing bicycle becomes a doorway into family memory, Taiwan’s history, war, migration and all the small objects that somehow carry entire lives inside them. Check the English excerpt here.
The Stolen Bicycle
Check If You Like It - Stolen Bicycle
The Stolen Bicycle (pdf)
A queer Taiwanese classic about desire, loneliness and trying to become yourself while everyone around you seems to have already decided who you should be. Sharp, strange, funny — and very Taipei in the way the city seems to absorb all that restless ... Read before you buy → free English excerpt from Books from Taiwan.
Notes of a Crocodile
Check If You Like It - Notes of a Crocodile
Notes of a Crocodile
Taipei after midnight — protests, restless young people, family ghosts and the White Terror still lingering underneath the city. Part coming-of-age novel, part political memory, and a very different way into contemporary Taiwan.
Taipei at Daybreak
Taiwan to Tokyo, queer identity, loneliness and the difficult work of becoming someone you can actually live as. Quiet, painful and very intimate — the kind of book that feels like it is thinking alongside you.
Solo Dance
Taiwanese, queer, darkly funny and haunted in more ways than one — a homecoming story about family, shame, memory and the ghosts that wait for you in the place you tried to leave behind. Curious first? Read a free English sample.
Ghost Town
Check If You Like It - Ghost Town
Ghost Town.pdf
Quiet, melancholic and beautifully precise — a novel about music, lost possibilities and the lives we might have lived. Very small in size, but it leaves a much larger echo behind. Fee English excerpt here.
The Piano Tuner: A Novel
Check If You Like It - The Piano Tuner
The Piano Tuner.pdf
Not a Taiwan book in the literal sense, but an essential Taiwanese-American detour — funny, inventive and painfully sharp about identity, stereotypes, assimilation and the roles other people keep writing for you.
Interior Chinatown (National Book Award Winner)
Not Taiwanese literature in the strict sense, but such an interesting Taipei book — language learning, belonging, family history and that strange feeling of being close to a culture and still slightly outside it.
Taipei Story: A Novel (B&N Exclusive Edition)
Ordinary people caught in a Taiwan changing much faster than they are — funny, sad and full of the tiny details through which social change becomes personal.
The Taste of Apples
Taipei absurdity, political satire and a dystopian future — for when you want Taiwanese literature to stop being polite and start playing with reality.
Zero and Other Fictions
History that refuses to stay historical. Wu He returns to the aftermath of the Musha Incident and turns colonial violence, memory and Indigenous survival into something formally strange and deeply unsettling.
Remains of Life
Flying squirrels, whales, cyborgs, clouded leopards and Indigenous knowledge — basically the book to pick up when you realize Taiwanese nature writing gets wonderfully weird.
A Taiwanese Ecoliterature Reader
Start far from Taipei: Orchid Island, Tao culture, ghosts, language and the sea as something closer to a teacher than a backdrop. Go deeper → a fascinating free conversation with both of Syaman Rapongan’s English translators about Tao language, the ocean and translating Indigenous Taiwan.
Eyes of the Ocean
Colonial Taiwan, Indigenous communities and foreign powers colliding in one strange, fascinating historical moment — a novel that makes the island’s past feel messy, human and very much alive. Then watch it with English subtitles → the full Taiwanese TV adaptation is available free on TaiwanPlus.
Puppet Flower: A Novel of 1867 Formosa
Follow the rabbit hole → Read a free excerpt / Watch the adaptation / Meet the translator / Explore the place.
If the books make you want to see the place for yourself, this is the Taipei I’d show someone on a first trip - famous things, stranger things and a few places I genuinely love.
Going to Taiwan? My 3-Day Taipei Itinerary
Want to try before you buy — or go a little deeper? Books from Taiwan offers free English excerpts and samples from Taiwanese books, perfect for discovering where the next rabbit hole might lead.
Books From Taiwan moc gov tw download.php
TaiwanPlus is a free English-language platform for exploring Taiwan through films, documentaries, series, culture and current affairs. Much of the content is in English, while Taiwanese and Mandarin productions are available with English subtitles — ...
TaiwanPlus – Bringing Taiwan to the World
Want to go deeper into Taiwanese literature? The Virtual Museum of Taiwan Literature offers free English exhibitions, author stories, literary history and links between books, places and screen adaptations — a lovely rabbit hole for understanding the...
臺灣文學虛擬博物館-首頁
For a deeper dive into Taiwanese literature and its wider cultural world, Taiwan Lit and the Global Sinosphere offers free essays, criticism, interviews and multimedia in English — a more academic rabbit hole, but a very rewarding one.
Taiwan Lit and the Global Sinosphere