Two new English books for TIBE 2026

The Taipei International Book Exhibition (TIBE) is held every year in early February. In 2026, we launched two new English books at the book fair. 

Mysteries from My Childhood: How I Found Out My Parents Were Spies in World War II is a project that I've been working on almost since I started at CityUHK Press in 2023. The personal stories in the book are really very interesting pieces of a puzzle—imagine if you suddenly discovered your parents were secretive because they had been spies for China and the Allies during the war?

However, the author is not a professional academic or writer, so his initial drafts needed a lot of work. In developmental editing, I guided him (and cut a lot of text) to keep the focus on his family and their role in key events, rather than including detailed facts and descriptions of the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II as a whole.

In contrast, Roaming the Steppe Silk Road was published about a year after I began reviewing the manuscript, and the author has written quite a number of books. Still, the project had its challenges.

First of all, the book was translated from Chinese, and although the translator is a native English speaker, he tended to use language that was a bit too poetic, not necessarily easy to read or understand. The original version also contained a lot of detailed references to ancient Chinese history, which needed to be removed to make the content accessible for Western audiences.