A new novel from R.F. Kuang is coming later this year.
William Morrow will publish the author’s Taipei Story in the fall, the press announced in a news release. It calls the book “a wryly humorous and profoundly moving coming-of-age novel that grapples with grief, language, and culture shock—all set against the backdrop of an unforgettable summer in Taipei.”
Kuang made her literary debut in 2018 with The Poppy War, the first in a trilogy of fantasy novels that continued with The Dragon Republic in 2019 and The Burning God in 2020.
She rose to fame in 2022 with her dark-academia novel Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution, which became a New York Times bestseller and won the Nebula Award for best novel. She went on to publish the novels Yellowface and Katabasis, both bestsellers.
Taipei Story, Morrow says, will follow Lily Chen, a Chinese American college freshman who spends a summer in Taipei on an intensive language program. Her life is thrown into disarray when she receives word that her grandfather has died.
“The novel explores language loss, inheritance, grief, and the emotional cost of assimilation with tenderness, humor, and remarkable precision,” Morrow says. “Compared to her earlier work, it is less polemical and more inward-looking, grounded in memory, interiority, and the unfinished conversations that shape families.”
Kuang shared news of the novel on Instagram, writing, “I wrote a book that denies the diaspora fantasy of fluency, homecoming, and reconnection. Instead I’ve lingered in the messy bits—the hilarity of mistranslation, the humiliation of getting it all wrong. Sometimes all we can do is muddle through the fog of language to tell our loved ones that we love them, we’re listening, and we care. That will have to be enough.”
Taipei Story is slated for publication on Sept. 8.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
