Yáng Shuāng-zǐ
Taiwan Travelogue
Winner of the 2026 International Booker Prize
Winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature
Winner of the 2024 Baifang Schell Book Prize for Outstanding Translated Literature from Chinese Language
Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, Taiwan Travelogue is a bittersweet story of love between two women, nested in an artful exploration of language, history and power. Set in May 1938, the young novelist Aoyama Chizuko sails from Japan to Taiwan where her interpreter helps her experience real island life and taste as much of its authentic cuisine as her famously monstrous appetite can bear.
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Print status: Available
Author: Yáng Shuāng-zǐ
Original language: Mandarin
Format: B-format Paperback
Publication date: 5 March 2026
ISBN: 9781916751651
Ebook ISBN: 9781916751668
Availability: Available
Number of pages: 320
Reviews
John Self
The Guardian
‘Experimental . . . playful . . . it will charm many readers.’
International Booker Prize judges
‘With sumptuous food writing, laugh-out-loud dialogue and metafictional twists, this novel was impossible to put down. Taiwan Travelogue pulls off an incredible double act: it succeeds as both a delicious romance and an incisive postcolonial novel.’
Fuchsia Dunlop
‘A witty, rapturous hymn to Taiwanese food and a stinging critique of Japanese colonialism. The gluttonous narrator Aoyama’s longed-for love story becomes a meditation on power, inequality and identity. A delicious read.’
New Statesman
‘Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s Taiwan Travelogue is a metafictional lesbian romance between a writer and an interpreter, styled as a rediscovered colonial-era novel in translation, complete with footnotes.’ New Statesman
Sean Wai Kung
‘This delicious book is a banquet for the heart and soul. Each dish and chapter offered both fills the reader and also leaves them salivating for more. At the same time, Taiwan Travelogue is about so much more than the food it describes. This is a story of translation and colonialism, national and personal identity, history and hospitality. A truly remarkable work which makes full use of both its form and its content.’
Christina Ng
‘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.’
Shahnaz Habib
New York Times Book Review
‘Yang Shuang-zi’s Taiwan Travelogue, a National Book Award winner, is a nesting-doll narrative about colonial power in its many forms.’
Talya Zax
The Atlantic
‘Within Yáng’s tough assessment of her well-meaning and fundamentally likable narrator lies a plea for introspection on the part of the powerful, and a reminder of what is at stake when that responsibility is neglected.’
Publishers Weekly
‘Yáng offers rich reflections on colonialism and translation along with delightful depictions of Taiwanese delicacies.’
Kirkus Reviews
‘A (fictional) Japanese writer explores the colourful and complex culinary, linguistic, and political dynamics that shaped life in 1930s Taiwan . . . A moving account of friendship in the shadow of the Japanese Southern Expansion policy.’