War, and the threat of war, spurs governments to invest in secret military technologies and weapons. Imperial Japan, ahead of the Second World War, was no exception. After the First World War, Japan set up the Noborito Research Institute: a division of scientists and technicians to invest in overt and clandestine warfare. Stephen Mercado dives into this history in his new book Japanese Spy Gear and Special Weapons: How Noborito’s Scientists and Technicians Served in the Second World War and the Cold War (Pen & Sword Books: 2025). At Noborito, Japanese scientists researched fanciful weapons, like balloon bombs and death rays; covert techniques like poisons and counterfeiting—and more insidious activities, like biological weapons. Stephen Mercado, the author of The Shadow Warriors of Nakano: A History of the Imperial Japanese Army’s Elite Intelligence School, has also written a dozen articles and several dozen book reviews on Asian and open-source intelligence. His writing has appeared in the journals Intelligence and National Security, International Journal of Intelligence and Counter Intelligence, Studies in Intelligence and on the website 38 North of the Henry L. Stimson Center. His translations include numerous declassified Chinese and Japanese diplomatic documents published as part of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project. Retired from the CIA Open Source Enterprise, he has twice won a CIA Studies in Intelligence award for his writings. He is also a frequent contributor to the Asian Review of Books. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Japanese Spy Gear and Special Weapons. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Begum Wilayat Mahal, the self-proclaimed heir to the House of Awadh, has fascinated journalists and writers for decades. She claimed she was Indian royalty, descended from the kings of Awadh, a kingdom annexed by the British in 1856. She spent a decade in the waiting room of the New Delhi train station, receiving journalists intrigued by the image of Indian royals in cramped conditions. Then, her family was granted use of a rundown 14th-century hunting lodge in Delhi; none were seen in public again. Both during Wilayat Mahal’s life, and after her death, journalists have tried to figure out whether her story was true, most famously by a 2019 feature by the New York Times that picked apart the family’s story. Now, in their book The House of Awadh: A Hidden Tragedy (HarperCollins India: 2025), Aletta André and Abhimanyu Kumar dig into Begum Wilayat Mahal’s past, chasing down leads in India and Pakistan to fully explore this story. Aletta André is a Dutch historian and journalist, who has covered South Asia for Dutch and international media since 2009. Abhimanyu Kumar is an Indian poet and journalist with a wide experience covering politics, arts, culture and minority issues. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The House of Awadh. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

In 1923, archaeologist Leonard Woolley stumbled upon a room that dated back to 530BC, the time of the Babylonians. Oddly, the room was filled with artifacts that were thousands of years older. A clay drum led Woolley to speculate that he might have stumbled across the world’s first museum. Whether that was really the case is still somewhat unknown. But this room is the inspiration behind Moudhy Al-Rashid’s book Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History (W.W. Norton / Hodder, 2025) which dives into the many different aspects of life and society across the many states that governed Mesopotamia. Moudhy Al-Rashid is an honorary fellow at the University of Oxford’s Wolfson College, where she specializes in the languages and history of ancient Mesopotamia. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Between Two Rivers. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Genevieve Yang, the protagonist of Jemimah Wei’s debut novel The Original Daughter (Doubleday/Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2025) works a dead-end job in Singapore, living in the shadow of her adopted younger sister, Arin, a rising movie star. Genevieve’s dying mother asks her to call Arin; Genevieve refuses. Jemimah’s novel then teases out the history of Gen and Arin’s sibling relationship, from their first meeting in the late 90s, through their shared experience in school, to the final grievance that splits them apart. Naomi Xu Elegant, journalist and author of Gingko Season, also joins the show today. Jemimah Wei is a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 Honouree, William Van Dyke Short Story Prize winner, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and Felipe P. De Alba Fellow at Columbia University. A recipient of awards and fellowships from Singapore’s National Arts Council, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Writers in Paradise, Jemimah’s writing has appeared in Joyland, Guernica, and Narrative, amongst others. She can be found on social media at @jemmawei on socials, or at jemmawei.com. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Original Daughter. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Between the First and Second World Wars, activists across the British Empire began to think about what their homes might look like as independent nations, rather than colonies subject to the control of London. Sometimes, these thinkers found refuge and common cause in others elsewhere in the Empire–such as between India and Egypt, , as Erin O’Halloran explores in her book East of Empire: Egypt, India, and the World Between the Wars (Stanford UP, 2025). India was the jewel in the British Empire’s crown; Egypt was the strategic artery that connected Britain’s eastern possessions with the metropole. Erin, in her book, explores how Indian and Egyptian thinkers were inspired by each other, through the aftermath of the First World War, the Italian invasion of Abyssynia, the Palestinian question, and the onset of the Second World War. Erin is the Marie Sklodowska Curie European Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of East of Empire. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

In 1831, the India Gazette wrote about a group of radical young thinkers that it credited for an upheaval in social and religious politics in Calcutta. These were the Young Bengal, the proteges of Henry Derozio of Hindu College. These thinkers, according to Rosinka Chaudhuri, were India’s first radicals, trying to reshape Indian politics as it came under the sway of the East India Company and the British Empire. Rosinka joins the show to talk about her book India’s First Radicals: Young Bengal and the British Empire (India Viking, 2025) and the British Empire, and where this group sits in the long history of Indian nationalist, anti-colonial and anti-imperial thought. Rosinka Chaudhuri is director and professor of cultural studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Her books include Gentlemen Poets in Colonial Bengal: Emergent Nationalism and the Orientalist Project (2002), Freedom and Beef Steaks: Colonial Calcutta Culture (2011) and The Literary Thing: History, Poetry and the Making of a Modern Cultural Sphere (2013). She has edited many books, among which are Derozio, Poet of India: The Definitive Edition (2008), A History of Indian Poetry in English (2016), and most recently, George Orwell’s Burmese Days for Oxford World’s Classics (2021). Many of her journal articles, reviews and book chapters have been published worldwide, while her translation of Rabindranath Tagore’s letters, titled Letters from a Young Poet (1887–1895), was published as a Penguin Modern Classic in 2014. London-based business and culture journalist Prarthana Prakash joins me on the show today as a guest host. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of India’s First Radicals. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Today’s international system is made up of states: Territorial entities with defined borders, with exclusive control within those borders, diplomatic recognition by other states outside of them and usually (though not always) tied to some idea of the “nation.” But how many states have existed throughout history, such as during the nineteenth century? Some early counts put the number at just a few dozen–a measure that international relations professors Charles R. Butcher and Ryan D. Griffiths thought was far too low, missing polities throughout the non-Western world. Together, they put together their own count of independent states in the nineteenth century, as published in their latest work Before Colonization: Non-Western States and Systems in the Nineteenth Century (Columbia UP, 2025). Charles joins us today to talk about his work. He is a professor in the Department of Sociology and Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. His research focuses on the legacies of historical states and state systems, democratization, and civil resistance. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Before Colonization. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

What happens if you took one of the classic characters of Chinese literary fiction and dropped him into early 20th-century China? That’s the premise of Wu Jianren’s novel, New Story of the Stone (Columbia UP, 2025), written in 1905, which takes Jia Baoyu, from the classic Dream of the Red Chamber, and takes him first to Qing China and the Boxer Rebellion, and then to the fantastical “Realm of Civilization,” a world that, in Wu’s eyes, reflected what he thought would happen if people embraced Chinese beliefs. Liz Webber just released a new translation on New Story of the Stone, and joins us today to talk about this piece of literary fanfiction, and what political points Wu wanted to achieve by writing his work of early Chinese science fiction. Liz Evans Weber is currently an assistant professor of instruction in Chinese and research assistant professor at the University of Rochester in New York, where she teaches a wide range of courses on Chinese literature and a workshop course on Chinese-to-English literary translation. Her published translations also include the short story “Boundless Night” by Yu Dafu (Renditions, Spring 2021) In 2025, she was awarded a Translation Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts for work on her next translation project, Flower in a Sea of Resentment by Jin Songcen and Zeng Pu. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of New Story of the Stone. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Partition—the rapid, uncoordinated, and bloody split between India and Pakistan after the Second World War—remains the central event of South Asian history. But 1947 wasn’t the only partition, according to historian and filmmaker Sam Dalrymple. Sam, in his book Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia (William Collins, 2025), notes that “British India” once spanned all the way from the Arabian Peninsula to the border with Thailand, covering South Arabia, South Asia and Burma. Yet between 1937 and 1971, the region split into various different national entities, creating the countries and borders we see today. Sam is a historian, filmmaker, and cofounder of Project Dastaan, a peacebuilding initiative that reconnects refugees displaced by the 1947 partition of India. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Shattered Lands. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced Executive Order 9066, which authorized the confinement of tens of thousands of Japanese and Japanese-Americans living in the Western U.S., sending them to cramped, hastily-constructed camps like Manzanar and Amache.  One such Japanese-American was Karl Yoneda, a well-known labor activist–and the husband of Elaine Yoneda, a Jewish-American woman. Elaine soon followed her husband to the Manzanar camp, after authorities threatened to send her three-year-old mixed-race son, Thomas, to the camp alone.  The Yonedas time in the camp is the subject of Tracy Slater’s book, Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp (Chicago Review Press, 2025) Tracy is a Jewish American writer from Boston, based in her husband’s country of Japan. Her previous book was the mixed-marriage memoir The Good Shufu: Finding Love, Self, and Home on the Far Side of the World (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2015). She has also published work in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Time’s Made by History, and more. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Together in Manzanar. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

I’m Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. On this show, we interview authors writing in, around, and about the Asia-Pacific region.King Lear, one of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies, starts with Lear dividing up his kingdom between his three daughters: Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. Goneril and Regan win the kingdom through flattery, Cordelia’s honesty is rewarded with exile. That opening–and the other developments in Lear’s tragic story–hold special resonance for Nan Z. Da, who uses Shakespeare’s play as a way to grapple with China’s history, and her own personal experiences with it. The result is The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear (Princeton UP, 2025)Nan Z. Da is associate professor of English at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Intransitive Encounter: Sino-US Literatures and the Limits of Exchange (Columbia University Press: 2018) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

I’m Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. On this show, we interview authors writing in, around, and about the Asia-Pacific region. How do you tell the story of India–not just the modern-day country, but the whole region of South Asia, home to over two billion people? Historian Audrey Truschke’s newest book, India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent (Princeton UP, 2025), starts at the very beginning: the rise of the Indus Valley Civilization, of which we still know frustratingly little. Her book covers millennia of history–the Vedas, Ashoka, the rise of Buddhism and Islam, the Mughals, the Marathas, the Company, and then newly independent India. Audrey Truschke is Professor of South Asian History at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. Her research focuses on the cultural, imperial, and intellectual history of medieval and early modern India as well as the politics of history in modern times. She is the author of four books. London-based business and culture journalist Prarthana Prakash joins me on the show today as a guest host. Find her on Linkedin. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

How did Tokyo—Japan’s capital, global city, tourist hotspot and financial center—get to where it is today? Tokyo–or then, Edo–had a rather unglamorous start, as a backwater on Japan’s eastern coast before Tokugawa decided to make it his de facto capital. Eiko Maruko Siniawer picks ten distinct moments in Edo’s, and then Tokyo’s, history to show how this village became one of the world’s most important cities. Moments like a brief crackdown on kabuki theater, or the opening ceremony of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics make up the chapters of what’s appropriately titled Ten Moments That Shaped Tokyo (Cambridge University Press: 2025) Eiko is the Charles R. Keller Professor of History at Williams College. A historian of modern Japan who has researched a wide range of topics, she is the author of three books—Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists: The Violent Politics of Modern Japan, 1860-1960 (Cornell University Press: 2015), Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan (Cornell University Press: 2024), and Ten Moments That Shaped Tokyo. She has also published articles in leading academic journals, such as “‘Affluence of the Heart’: Wastefulness and the Search for Meaning in Millennial Japan” in the Journal of Asian Studies, and “‘Toilet Paper Panic’: Uncertainty and Insecurity in Early 1970s Japan” in the American Historical Review. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Ten Moments That Shaped Tokyo. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

In 2019, famed journalist and writer Aatish Taseer was thrown out of India. Soon after he wrote a cover article for Time calling Prime Minister Narendra Modi the country’s “divider in chief,” New Delhi decided to revoke his residency. That sent Aatish on a journey across the world–to places like Turkey, Spain, Mexico and Sri Lanka–to explore identity, both his own and of different nations. The result is his latest book, A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile (Catapult: 2025). Aatish is the author of the memoir Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands (Canongate: 2009) and the acclaimed novels The Way Things Were (Pan Macmillan: 2014), a finalist for the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize, The Temple-Goers (Viking: 2010), short-listed for the Costa First Novel Award, and Noon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 2011); and the memoir and travelog The Twice-Born (Hurst: 2019). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of A Return to Self. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Sanjana Satyananda, the main character of Sanjena Sathian’s novel, Goddess Complex (Penguin Press, 2025), is a bit of a mess. She’s back in the States after a spell in India, ending her marriage with her actor husband when he wanted kids…and she didn’t. Her friends are starting to settle down–and wondering when Sanjana will do the same. And, distressingly, others in her life swear they’ve seen her back in India, still married to her husband, and happily pregnant. This question–who is the woman that’s encroaching on Sanjana’s life–motivates Goddess Complex, with the novel eventually returning to India to explore the pressure to have children, the rise of social media and mommy bloggers, and the strange appeal of cults. Sanjena Sathian is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Goddess Complex and Gold Diggers, both published by Penguin Press. Goddess Complex, released in March of 2025, was named a top anticipated book of the year by TIME and has been named a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Gold Diggers was named a Top 10 Best Book of 2021 by the Washington Post and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Sanjena can be followed on Substack at: https://sanjena.substack.com/ You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Goddess Complex. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

The Russians came late to Japan, arriving after the Portuguese and other European powers. But as soon as they arrived, Russia tried to use spies and espionage to learn more about their neighbor—with various degrees of success. Sometimes, it failed miserably, like Russia’s early attempts to make contact with pre-Meiji Japan, or the debacle during the Russo-Japanese War. Other times, they were wildly successful, like during the Battle of Khalkin Gol or with Richard Sorge’s spy ring during the Second World War. James D. Brown covers Russia and the Soviet Union’s efforts to learn more about Japan in Cracking the Crab: Russian Espionage Against Japan, from Peter the Great to Richard Sorge (Hurst, 2025), covering much both the famous examples of Russian spycraft, and the lesser-known missions—like Operation Postman, a successful effort to read the mail of Japanese diplomats in Italy. James is Professor of Political Science at Temple University, Japan. He is a specialist on East Asian politics and a regular media contributor, including for the BBC. His books include Japan, Russia and their Territorial Dispute (Routledge: 2016); and Japan’s Foreign Relations in Asia (Routledge: 2018) and The Abe Legacy (Lexington Books: 2023) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Cracking the Crab. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Macau–onetime Portuguese colony, now casino hotspot–has long captured the imaginations of travelers, reporters, artists and writers. The city served as the only gateway to China for centuries; then, after the rise of Hong Kong, its slightly seedier vibe made it a popular setting for books, articles and movies exploring the more criminal elements of society. Paul French joins us, once again, to talk about his new book Destination Macao (Blacksmith Books: 2024) the latest book in his Destination series. We chat about colonies and casinos, but also some of the lesser-known parts of Macau’s history, like an aborted British attempt to invade Macau in 1808; furious media rumors in 1935 about Japan’s interest in buying the colony, and the city’s brief time as an aviation hub for the Pan Am Clipper. Paul French was born in London and lived and worked in Shanghai for many years. His book Midnight in Peking was a New York Times Bestseller and a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. He received the Mystery Writers’ of America Edgar award for Best Fact Crime and a Crime Writers’ Association (UK) Dagger award for non-fiction. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Destination Macao. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

For centuries, scribes across East Asia used Chinese characters to write things down–even in languages based on very different foundations than Chinese. In southern China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, people used Chinese to read and write–and never thought it was odd. It was, after all, how things were done. Even today, Cantonese speakers use Chinese characters to reflect their dialect with no issues, while kanji remains a key part of Japanese writing. Even in South Korea, the Chosun Ilbo newspaper uses Chinese characters for its title, even as most of Korea has turned to hangul. Zev Handel talks about how classical Chinese came to dominate East Asia in his book Chinese Characters across Asia: How the Chinese Script Came to Write Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese (University of Washington Press, 2025). How do Chinese characters even work? How did Chinese script spread across the region? And what was it like to read and write in a language that you couldn’t even speak? Zev Handel is professor of Chinese linguistics in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington. He is author of Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script and associate coeditor of Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Chinese Characters Across Asia. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Naomi Xu Elegant’s debut novel, Gingko Season (W. W. Norton: 2025), stars Penelope Lin, a young Chinese woman living in New York in the faraway year of 2018. With difficult parents and a bad break-up, she works for a museum’s exhibition on bound feet, with a gaggle of other, somewhat clueless friends. But a meeting with Hoang, a researcher at a cancer lab, forces Penelope to rethink what she wants with her life. Naomi joins me today to talk about her book, her choice of characters, how she wanted to approach tropes like the meet-cute—and why 2018 now feels like ancient history, even to young-ish millennials. Naomi Xu Elegant is a writer and journalist living in New York City. Her work has appeared in Monocle, Fortune, Atlas Obscura, and elsewhere. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

China, famously, built the Great Wall to defend against nomadic groups from the Eurasian steppe. For two millennia, China interacted with groups from the north: The Xiongnu, the Mongols, the Manchus, and the Russians. They defended against raids, got invaded by the north, and tried to launch diplomatic relations. John Man, in his book Conquering the North: China, Russia, Mongolia: 2,000 Years of Conflict (Oneworld Publications, 2025), takes on this long history, combining it with his own on-the-ground experience seeing some of this history for himself. He starts with the Xiongnu—a nomadic group that’s so unknown, historically, that we’re forced to use the pejorative Chinese term for them—all the way to the Second World War, and the seminal Battle of Khalkin Gol, which halted the Japanese advance into Northern Asia. John Man is a historian specializing in Mongolia and the relationship between Mongol and Chinese cultures. He studied Mongolian as a post-graduate, and after a brief career in journalism and publishing, he turned to writing. John’s books have been published in over twenty languages around the world and include bestselling biographies of Chinggis Khan, Kublai Khan, and Attila the Hun, as well as histories of the Great Wall of China and the Mongolian Empire. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Conquering the North. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review