My favourite book of 2025: “The Paper Menagerie and other stories” by Ken Liu
I’m a bit late posting about my favourite book I read in 2025, but here we are! It’s been quite a busy few weeks since welcoming our third child into the world, so this post just slipped down my to-do-list. But better late than never, eh, and this book is definitely worth the wait.
What it’s about: This is the first short story collection by the brilliant Ken Liu and it is jam-packed with excellent stories that cover both sci-fi and fantasy, many of which either won (or were finalists for) top genre fiction awards. Many of the stories in this collection draw on Chinese folklore and are the tales of non-Western protagonists, which is a refreshing change to a lot of the SFF I’ve read over the years.
Why I love it: I taught English in China for a year after graduating from university, which was a wonderful experience and left me with a soft spot for Chinese culture and history. I loved how Ken Liu weaved Chinese myths and folklore into his stories alongside clever, high-tech concepts and his writing is just brilliant. The eponymous story is the only story to have won the Nebula, Hugo and World Fantasy Award. It is a moving tale of a mixed race boy in 1980s USA who pushes away his Chinese mother and rejects her (and his) heritage so he can fit in. The speculative element of the story is that his mother can bring to life origami animals (hence the title), which she gifts him as he is growing up. I’m not going to lie, I shed a tear at this one. Another of my favourite stories in this collection included ‘The Litigation Master and the Monkey King’, which is about a humble, peasant lawyer taking on corrupt, land-grabbing officials in ancient China. Also, ‘Mono No Aware‘, which is about a Japanese man who was taken onboard a spaceship leaving a collapsing Earth as a child, the only Japanese survivor from Earth, as he seeks to continue his culture and heritage in space and the hard decisions he faces to save others. I could go on and on and into each story in much more detail but this post would become War and Peace. Trust me when I say it is easy to see why Ken Liu is such a heavyweight in the field and has won so many awards.
Beyond the book: Ken Liu also happens to be a Writers of the Future alumni (his story, “Gossamer” was published in Volume 19) and his 24 hour story from that workshop, ‘State Change’, features in this collection. It’s a fun story set in a world where a person’s soul is an item they are born with and which shapes their personality (the protagonist’s soul is a block of ice), which I think is a really cool premise (I’ll show myself out). It’s amazing to read that story and think it was written during the same challenge I recently completed. It really motivates me to keep writing and to keep submitting and to always try and improve as a writer.
Not content with ‘just’ writing award-winning stories, Ken Liu is an acclaimed translator too. He translated, among others, the Chinese science fiction novel “The Three Body Problem” by Liu Cixin (which won a Hugo award) and ‘Invisible Planets’ (an anthology of Chinese science fiction short stories, which is sat on my to-be-read pile). To top it off (for me), he also used to be a lawyer before he became a full-time writer, a career trajectory which is certainly an inspiration to me. I recently read his 2017 interview on the WOTF website and listened to his WotF podcast appearance and much of what he said about juggling being a writer and lawyer with young children (and obsessing over a single story rather than moving on and writing others instead) really resonates with me. I’ve kind of gone all fan-boy over Ken Liu but, frankly, he is awesome so I don’t care.
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