For this month's Fish Island Book Supper Club we are reading the highly enjoyableTaiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-zi.

In 1938, Aoyama Chizuko a Japanese novelist arrives in colonial Taiwan and falls headlong into its food with dish after dish carried home from market stalls and family kitchens. Ô Chizuru guides her, interprets for her, and cooks alongside her. What looks at first like a gourmand's travel diary slowly reveals something sharper underneath: the uneven weight of who gets to write, who gets to translate, and who feeds whom.

This year's winner of the International Booker Prize (and the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature before it), Yang Shuang-zi's novel (in Lin King's translation) is the first book translated from Mandarin Chinese to take the Booker. The judges called it a book that succeeds as both a romance and an incisive postcolonial novel; the New York Times described it as slippery and sharp on how power shapes a relationship. It frames itself as a rediscovered text, layering fiction over history with footnotes and forewords until you can't quite tell where one ends and another begins. A book about appetite in every sense - a very fitting one to read over dinner.

Your ticket includes:

A copy of Taiwan Travelogue
A pizza of your choice from the Classic Pizza menu
A glass of house wine or beer (or soft drink)
A small tiramisu

Book available for collection from Fish Island Books (in Unlock). Delivery possible — contact us at info@fishislandbooks.com

Contact the host of Fish Island Book Supper Club - August

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