“Reading the book is like peeling an onion: the smell is at first undetectable; but with each layer you peel, the smell gets more intoxicating, pungent, intense, and at the very end, it brings tears to your eyes.”—Christina Ng

“Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s novel, a runaway bestseller in Taiwan, ranges from playful and intimate depictions of the lush countryside of Taiwan to the ordered world of the colonial city. But what at first feels like a simple travelogue is actually an examination of an often-overlooked period of East Asian history and of the human heart. This wise and wily novel, as self-aware as it is provocative, ultimately goes down like the luscious dumplings that appear in its pages and sent me scrambling for takeout. But what does it mean to eat someone else’s food, and what is the nature of a relationship when any kind of power is involved? Beginning in a world as solid and stately as Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters, Taiwan Travelogue deftly takes the reader down a rabbit hole as filled with longing and misunderstanding as Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch.”—Marie Mutsuki Mockett, author of The Tree Doctor

“Yáng offers rich reflections on colonialism and translation along with delightful depictions of Taiwanese delicacies.”—Publishers Weekly

“Translator Lin King manages to produce a metafictional English text that is rich and intimate, full of poetry and humor, and which comfortably plays with the layers of Japanese and Mandarin Chinese. But King’s main achievement might be how she carries and sustains the subtle tensions hidden in bits of dialogue, how the nature of the two women’s platonic relationship oscillates with each line and encounter. It’s an achievement.”—Bruna Dantas Lobato