Taipei Story

Chinese American college student Lily Chen spends a summer in Taiwan in an intensive Mandarin program, hoping fluency will bring her closer to her family and to a heritage that increasingly feels out of reach. Instead, she discovers that belonging is far more complicated than learning the right vocabulary.

Published on September 8, Kuang’s new novel is quieter and more realist than much of her earlier work. Through Lily’s language struggles, friendships, family grief and life in Taipei, the novel examines migration, inheritance and the uneasy distance between the identity we receive and the identity we actually live. Here, language becomes both a bridge and a barrier, leading to a larger question: when we cannot fully speak the language of home, where does home begin?

The New York Times Book Review, Lauren Christensen, September 7, 2026
A rave. Christensen calls this Kuang's quietest book to date and, by a wide margin, her most sophisticated. The author known for loud, sprawling fantasy has lowered her voice here, and in the critic's view that restraint has made her a better novelist.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/07/books/review/taipei-story-rf-kuang.html
Chicago Review of Books, Reema Saleh, September 8, 2026
A review from the angle of diaspora fiction, with praise and reservations side by side. Saleh finds the novel's strength in the gap between who Lily is and who she might have been had she grown up in her family's homeland, and in her grief for a grandfather whose death leaves the family's history unanswered. The reservation is that much of the book reads like a study-abroad diary, page after page of food, cafes and memorized and forgotten vocabulary, with the story drifting in the middle without direction.
https://chireviewofbooks.com/2026/09/08/taipei-story-rf-kuang/
Slate, Laura Miller, May 20, 2026
A piece that weighs both the novel and the controversy that preceded its publication. Miller finds Kuang's observations of the shifting friendships of twenty-year-olds sharp and true, and her Taipei more vivid than the settings of her other novels; where the early books sometimes felt shaped by market research, this one reads as honest self-expression. On the objection to an unnamed Israeli pianist who appears for two pages, Miller notes that the character has no lines and no role in the plot, and that most of the protest came before anyone had read the book.
https://slate.com/culture/2026/05/rf-kuang-israeli-taipei-story-gaza-book-booktok.html