Taiwanese fiction is short on great novels about Taipei specifically, but the city's recent past and present have been well served by a generation of writers worth seeking out before you go.
- Wu Ming-yi, The Stolen Bicycle (2015). A meditative novel that follows a writer searching for his father's lost bicycle, weaving through a Taipei of street markets, repair shops and old neighbourhoods. It is one of the best portraits of the city in any language.
- Pai Hsien-yung, Taipei People (1971). A short-story cycle following Kuomintang-era mainlanders rebuilding their lives in 1960s Taipei. Spare, melancholy, and crucial for understanding the city's complex identity.
- Chu T'ien-wen, Notes of a Desolate Man (1994). A philosophical, fragmentary novel by one of Taiwan's most important contemporary writers — its narrator drifts through Taipei's gay subculture, family obligations, and a country still finding itself after martial law.
- Jonathan Manthorpe, Forbidden Nation: A History of Taiwan (2005). Not fiction, but the clearest single-volume English-language account of how Taiwan got to where it is. Heavy reading but invaluable.
- Hou Hsiao-hsien (film, not book), A City of Sadness (1989). Not a book, but anyone who reads novels of place ought to see this film. Set in a family running a restaurant in Jiufen through the 1945-49 transition from Japanese rule to Nationalist control, it is the foundational work of contemporary Taiwanese cinema.