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May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She's been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste as much of its authentic cuisine as her famously monstrous appetite can bear.Soon a Taiwanese woman - who is younger even than she is, and who shares the characters of her name - is hired as her interpreter and makes her dreams come true. The charming, erudite, meticulous Chizuru arranges Chizuko's travels all over the Land of the South and also proves to be an exceptional cook. Over scenic train rides and braised pork rice, lively banter and winter melon tea, Chizuko grows infatuated with her companion and intent on drawing her closer. But something causes Chizuru to keep her distance. It's only after a heartbreaking separation that Chizuko begins to grasp what the "something" is.Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, this novel was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan's highest literary honour, the Golden Tripod Award. Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships.

Not Sidney Poitier is an amiable young man in an absurd country. The sudden death of his mother orphans him at age eleven, leaving him with an unfortunate name, an uncanny resemblance to the famous actor and, perhaps more fortunate, a staggering number of shares in the Turner Broadcasting Corporation. Percival Everett's hilarious new novel follows Not Sidney's tumultuous life, as the social hierarchy scrambles to balance his skin color with his fabulous wealth.

In August 2017, over a thousand neo-Nazis, fascists, Klan members, and neo-Confederates descended on a small southern city to protest the pending removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Within an hour of their arrival, the city’s historic downtown was a scene of bedlam as armored far-right cadres battled activists in the streets. Before the weekend was over, a neo-Nazi had driven a car into a throng of counterprotesters, killing a young woman and injuring dozens.Pulitzer Prize finalist Deborah Baker has written a riveting and panoptic account of what unfolded that weekend, focusing less on the rally’s far-right leaders than on the story of the city itself. University, local, and state officials, including law enforcement, were unable or unwilling to grasp the gathering threat. Clergy, activists, and organizers from all walks of life saw more clearly what was coming and, at great personal risk, worked to warn and defend their city.To understand why their warnings fell on deaf ears, Baker does a deep dive into American history. In her research, she discovers an uncannily similar event that took place decades before when an emissary of the poet and fascist Ezra Pound arrived in Charlottesville intending to start a race war. In Charlottesville, Baker shows how a city more associated with Thomas Jefferson than civil unrest became a flashpoint in a continuing struggle over our nation’s founding myths.

In February 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbour, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order authorising the secretary of war to remove 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes on the West Coast and corral them into inland concentration camps. To be considered for release, they were required to answer the so-called loyalty questionnaire. Question 27 asked the inmates - who had been imprisoned without cause by the US military - whether they were willing to serve in combat for the US military. Question 28 asked them - many of whom American citizens who had never visited Japan - to renounce allegiance to the Japanese emperor. Answering these questions caused volatile divisions within the camps, tore families and friends apart, and had lasting repercussions in the decades postwar.Questions 27 & 28 reaches backward and forward from the time of the questionnaire, chronicling the individuals who arrived in the US from Japan at the turn of the century, their children who came of age during war and incarceration, and their descendants who lived in its aftermath. Yamashita mixes fact with fiction and layers genres from James Bond movies to haiku to oral history, transfiguring an enormity of archival research into a chorus of stories. With her signature wit and aplomb, she gives voice to labourers, artists, scholars, informants, and activists who, over three generations, defined an immigrant community.