Read it in the Green Room

Taiwan Travelogue

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ

Graywolf Press · 2024

  • setting1930s colonial Taiwan
  • atmosphereMoving friendship, culinary colour
  • paceDeliberately hard to pin down

A novel presented as the translation of a rediscovered 1950s Japanese travel memoir, following a writer's lecture tour of 1930s colonial Taiwan and her friendship with her interpreter. Rich in food, language and politics.

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The Green Room

Backstage of Taiwan Travelogue.

Walk in mid-chapter. The people of the book are there, as themselves, knowing what they know so far — and nothing else. Ask them anything. They have read exactly as far as you have.

A moment in the Green Room

Taiwan Travelogue · Yáng Shuāng-zǐ

The narrator

Of Taiwan Travelogue, as they are at your reading place

You

What happens next?

The narrator

“I can only tell you what you have read. Past your page there is nothing yet — not for you, and not for me. Turn it, and come back.”

Their knowledge stops where your reading does.

Illustrative conversation. The app answers from the passages you have read.

Who is in the room

Anyone who has walked on by your page.

The cast

Any character who has appeared so far. Someone who hasn’t walked on yet isn’t in the room. That’s not a limitation; that’s the point.

The narrator

The voice telling you the story, as far as it has told it.

The author

As the book presents them — the mind behind the pages you have read, not a biography.

The book itself

Ask what it is doing to you so far. It answers from its own pages, up to yours.

Before you go in

What critics and prize juries said.

Editorial synthesis

Kirkus Reviews called it a moving account of friendship that blends sharp observation with subversive political meditation into a colorful portrait of pre-war Taiwan. The Atlantic, writing about colonialism and food, found a book that makes readers work for it, deliberately built so that its soul is hard to locate.

Drawn from Kirkus Reviews, The Atlantic.

How it stays unspoiled

Nothing past your page exists.

The companion is assembled from the passages you have read and only those. A character who knows the ending is no one worth talking to, so there is no override — not behind a setting, not behind a confirmation. Your position is the wall.

You are here

Get the book

One ebook. Yours.

US$11.99ebook · eBooks.com

Buy the ebook once, read it in Green Room — or in any reader you already use.

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