India, Feb. 28 -- The origins of evil are murky, but hardly unknown. It co-exists with us. Its most malicious forms, however, are manifested in things that we hold sacred, like love. In Taiwanese author Lin Yi-Han's unnerving novel, Fang Si-Chi's First Love Paradise, evil is omnipresent and soaked deeply into the narrative.

It takes the form of the seemingly harmless Lee Guo-Hua, literature tutor at the eponymous protagonist's high school, who rapes his students for years on end, even as he continues to be an upstanding social worker with big dreams for his own daughter and wife. Evil takes another form in Chien Yi-Wei, a man who beats his wife brutally when he is inebriated; once, to the point where she miscarries their child. It is unc...