Luchterhand

Leh-Wei Liao | Glaszeit (The Age of Glass) | Luchterhand | 288 pages | 24 EUR

There are novels about Taiwan that explore the country through its history. Stephan Thome, who lives in Taiwan himself, recently did this from a German perspective, and masterfully so, with Pflaumenregen. Yang Shuang-zi’s magnificent, award-winning Taiwan Travelogue, meanwhile, weaves a dense, historical narrative from gastronomy, language, and colonial history. Leh-Wei Liao’s debut Glaszeit, which is on the longlist for the 2026 German Book Prize and has been nominated for the Bavarian Book Prize, focuses on something else: present-day Taiwan, and a young woman who is neither a tourist nor truly at home there.

Novana is a doctor: she grew up in Germany and moved to Taipei. In a neonatal intensive care unit, she looks after tiny bodies that aren’t quite ready for the world yet. We can infer from these passages that Liao, born in Göttingen in 1993, is a doctor herself, without the novel having to emphasise her medical knowledge. A child born at 23 weeks has lung tissue that is still “designed for liquid gas exchange.” Now, it must breathe air. It is one of those metaphors that Liao need not explain explicitly, because Novana, too, seems both made for the environment she is in, and yet not.

Her Mandarin is good, but not second nature. “Are you self-taught?” she asks Sihan, a young Taiwanese woman she has just met. Sihan notices Novana’s awkward choice of words and suspects that no one dares to correct her. “Language isn’t something that just happens,” Novana observes. This casual sentence encapsulates much of what makes Glaszeit so compelling. Migration does not appear here as a movement from a homeland to a foreign land. Novana returns to her mother’s country and in doing so, discovers her own foreignness.

In this respect, Glaszeit shares similarities with another fascinating debut, Nyla Matuk’s Leila & Khaled, in which a Palestinian-Canadian woman travels to the land of her ancestors for the first time and realises that genealogical origins do not in themselves create a sense of cultural belonging. Leila, too, views her supposed homeland through a Western-influenced lens; she, too, attempts to establish a connection, through her love for a local man, that cannot be forced. In Matuk’s novel, it is the Palestinian Khaled; in Liao’s, the Taiwanese Sihan. In both novels, desire thus becomes perhaps the most intimate litmus test of the migration experience: even where physical distance disappears, another form of estrangement persists. Origin proves not to be something to which one can simply return.

Liao thus upends a familiar German-language perspective on Taiwan: not, here, a German man trying to make sense of Taiwan, but a German woman with a Taiwanese family history trying to determine whether this country can truly be hers. The story unfolds in a refreshingly unspectacular way. The MRT, the subway, karaoke, night markets, hospital cafeterias, dating apps, shopping: these small, everyday details give a picture of a surprisingly contemporary Taipei.

Politics, too, remains part of this everyday life. Novana’s friend and lover, Sihan, works for a fact-checking NGO because Taiwan, more than almost any other democracy, is exposed to Chinese disinformation campaigns. Military manoeuvres in the Taiwan Strait appear amid news from Gaza, German border controls, AfD polls, and Trump’s trade war. Later, Novana asks a colleague if she would stay in the event of a Chinese invasion. The answer is: she doesn’t know. “We had to pretend everything was normal. We had to believe it for each other.” Rarely is Taiwan’s current situation described more succinctly in the novel.

Overlying this present, however, is a very private past. Novana’s mother, March, a Taiwanese artist, left her daughter behind in Germany eighteen years previously. In Taipei, Novana's first encounter with her is not in person but on a digital billboard, larger than life. Later, she is confronted with March’s art - and thus with a mother who has turned her own motherhood into the subject of a performance. Here, too, the novel strikingly echoes Liao’s own biography: in addition to her work as a doctor, she studies fine arts in Kassel. She has been writing since 2022, has published in literary magazines, and in 2024 received a fellowship from the Jürgen Ponto Foundation and the Kölner Schmiede. So medicine, art, and literature coexist both for her and within the novel.

And it is precisely at this unusual intersection that the novel’s unsettling core lies. March has abandoned her child, had her own uterus removed, and, in her art, explores motherhood, non-motherhood, and the female body. She offers no explanation. She asks for no forgiveness. And, thankfully, Liao makes little effort to portray her retrospectively as a tragic, neglectful mother with understandable psychological motives. A woman’s right not to want to be a mother clashes with a child’s right to suffer as a result of that decision. Both stand firm.

This conflict finds its strongest resonance in the neonatal intensive care unit. A mother decides to give her child up for adoption. Novana reacts professionally—until she can't take it any longer. “Children took whatever they could get,” she thinks, and flees, crying, to the staff bathroom. For a moment, the novel’s carefully controlled surface cracks.

Most of the time, however, Liao keeps her protagonist at a distance—even from herself. Sex brings no redemption. Men appear on Bumble and then disappear again. With Sihan, the possibility of a different kind of intimacy arises, but even that remains precarious. At one point, recalling Theo, a former lover of hers in Germany, she notes that during sex, the body’s boundaries simply could not be dissolved: “In the end, we couldn’t give each other ecstasy or redemption, only warmth.” This could almost be considered the emotional poetics of this novel.

This restraint is both a strength and a problem. For Glaszeit is very deliberately composed. Glass signifies fragility and transparency, hospitals and cities of skyscrapers, protection and separation. Premature babies, motherhood, the womb, adoption, migration, loss of language, dating, queer desire, and a politically threatened Taiwan are constantly reflected in one another. At times, this almost becomes a scene teeming with metaphors. Where everything points to something else, the concrete world—which the novel so convincingly creates—threatens to disappear once again behind its own meaning.

Glaszeit regains its balance through those passages in which Liao accumulates less meaning and observes more closely: through medical procedures, conversations among colleagues, subway rides, news feeds, dating apps, or the tiny hand of a premature baby clasping Novana’s finger. Here, the novel possesses a casual precision that is more powerful than some of its artfully arranged reflections.

Perhaps that is why Glaszeit need not be read as a great Taiwanese novel. Its historical scope is too narrow and its perspective deliberately too subjective for that. It is more interesting as a novel of the 'in-between': between two languages, two countries, closeness and withdrawal, motherhood and non-motherhood, medical care and an inability to forge close personal connections. Even Taiwan finds itself in a state of limbo within the novel: democratic everyday life under the constant threat of violent destruction.

Glaszeit does not attempt to resolve these contradictions. This makes the novel occasionally cold, sometimes overly contrived, but also refreshingly contemporary. Novana's coming-of-age journey does not lead to the discovery of a stable identity. Her route to Taiwan, to her mother and to a new love is by no means easy. At best, she learns to live with boundaries that cannot be dissolved. Perhaps this is less comforting than the classic narrative of “arriving.” But for a novel about migration, motherhood, and contemporary Taiwan, it is the right choice.

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