Chronicles of stolen bicycles

A novel by Taiwan's most successful modern writer

First published in 2015, the novel "Chronicles of the Crooked Rovers" was awarded the Taiwan Literature Prize in the same year and was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2018. An avid and active author, Wu has spent years gaining industry knowledge and learning bicycle repair techniques from generations of old masters and has become a bicycle enthusiast, tinkerer and collector himself. A tribute to the people living on or connected to his home island, the novel weaves together Taiwan's complex history, including the bicycle industry, the art of butterfly wing collage, zoo history, child soldiers, and World War II history in Indochina and Malay Peninsula. Its multi-layered plot traces the tangled past between Taiwanese aborigines, Japanese colonizers, Chinese immigrants, and war victims from Southeast Asia—from Japanese colonial times to Chiang Kai-shek's dictatorship and finally to today's liberal democracy.