* 2024 Taipei Book Fair Award

* 2024 Taiwan Literature Award

Joy and sorrow are interwoven in the spiritual landscapes of both those who have left and those who have come to the island, where they become life’s everyday details. This book is dedicated to all colonized islands.

Lu-pin, a Taiwanese writer who resides in Canada, lived on a Caribbean island for three years due to her husband’s job. She realized that the remote island nation and Taiwan shared certain characteristics – both are located in the tropics or subtropics, were once colonies, and are home to people influenced by colonial cultures. After her return to Canada, she wrote three short stories set in a fictional Caribbean nation called Sugar Bun Island, based on her memories and observations of life on the island.

In “Dry Season”, an older woman wants to buy land, build a house, and live out her retirement years on her native island after many years of hard work in the UK. Unfortunately, nothing turns out according to plan. “Phases of the Moon” looks at island life from the perspective of a white Canadian professor who dies unexpectedly and becomes a ghost. Although the truth about her death is soon known thanks to who she was, she must still deal with loss and sadness. “Cashew Bay” begins with the sea view from a prison window. The prisoner, a man from a lower-class background, reflects on the misfortunes that have pulled him into ever deeper difficulties.

Reflecting various aspects of post-colonial society, the stories in this book describe how the intersection of cultures affects and is affected by human nature: the subtly superior attitude of a lower-class migrant worker toward her compatriots and immigrant neighbors after returning from a life abroad; a nation’s colonial legacy expressed as a white woman watching the world go on as usual after her death; and the outsiders who, regardless of their intent, change the fate of a mixed-race man for the worse. Lu-pin confronts cruel reality with poetic flare, these stories of a fictional island nation allowing us to rediscover ourselves.