A house with no right angles. A father who vanished like the wind. And a pair of twins who shared everything.

Yang Shuang-zi's debut essay collection and her most intimate work, Neighbors with Chang Jih-Hsing turns from the colonial Taiwan of Taiwan Travelogue to her own childhood in a broken family in Taichung. The prize-winning title essay opens on a house built by a grandmother who was no architect: two front doors, two staircases, not a single rectangular room. Into this disorder, with an absent father, a distant mother and a bullying uncle, twin girls were born. They shared one book, one beating, one video game level, and they were each other's constant.

In five movements, Us, Eating, Walking, Writing and Sleeping, the book pairs essays that circle the same ground from different angles, and the whole structure quietly converges on grief. Yang's twin sister died of cancer in 2015. Afterwards she kept writing under the pen name “Shuang-zi” (“twins”), so that “we” would not wholly become “I.”

Funny, unsentimental and devastating by turns, and winner of the Openbook Best Book Award, this is the essential companion to Taiwan Travelogue.