Chris Horton’s “Ghost Nation: The Story of Taiwan and Its Struggle for Survival” is a portrait of a society that has fought, again and again, to assert its own existence.

Taiwan sits at the epicenter of a political power competition between the United States and the People’s Republic of China, but its story is still too often told as a subplot in someone else’s narrative. For readers in Japan, “Ghost Nation” offers something rare: a history that takes seriously the enduring weight of Japan’s colonial legacy in shaping Taiwan’s identity and its democracy.

Ghost Nation: The Story of Taiwan and Its Struggle for Survival, by Chris Horton. 336 pages. PAN MACMILLAN, nonfiction.