Asian Review of Books

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/adchoicesSupport 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/adchoicesSupport 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/adchoicesSupport 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/adchoicesSupport 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/adchoicesSupport 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/adchoicesSupport 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/adchoicesSupport 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/adchoicesSupport 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/adchoicesSupport 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review