Archives: Books

Deeply humane, in turn wry and humorous, the stories in this collection haunt readers with their searing honesty.
Lalitha, abused by her own mother, learns that bullies carry emotional traumas that scar everyone’s lives.
Shiva Das confronts the truth of his own culpability when his adult special child dies in tragic circumstances.
A woman, deeply in love with her husband, discovers to her anguish that the love of a good man is not enough.
A little boy tries hard to hold his family together as his parents’ marriage disintegrates before his eyes.
A mother has a poignant yet brutal conversation with God about her severely disabled son.
Three young people idealistically reject racial prejudice and stereotyping, only to find that in Malaysia, their future paths are largely determined by ethnicity and privilege.
The extent to which a woman will go in her hatred for her daughter’s childhood friend, ends in a violent aftermath.
An Indonesian maid realizes that the money she sends home has become more important than her own welfare or safety to her family.
A racial slur triggers reflections on friendship, identity, the loss of belonging and trust in a multi-racial community.
Meet the extraordinary in ordinary people when they confront the truth of their past and present – and refuse to look away. Authentic and unsentimental, each story celebrates the resilience of the human spirit even as it challenges comfortable conventions about identity, love, family, community and race relations.

Set in a fictional province in the Philippines, the novel tells the story of the Arguelleses, the Visbales, and the Monsantillos-and their eventual downfall.

The three families are members of powerful, wealthy haciendero clans that have long stood uncontested by those in their midst. But beneath the gleam and glitter of their lives lie age-old secrets that speak of deceit, greed, and corruption. Sins amassed over generations will come to a head, calamities and death will wreak havoc on the land, transgressors will face vengeance-and so the cycle goes on.
The Maps of Camarines is a chronicle of the forces that have and continue to assail Philippine society today, as well as the consequences if they are left to fester in the time to come.

A collection of short fiction on love, longing and loss written in the realist and fantastic modes

A young boy and his sisters gather beautiful shells on the beach as mementos of a country they will leave behind. A girl who loves the Beatles sees dwarfs that are drawn charcoal-black on a white plate. A rich matron in Singapore discovers a primeval thing in her ritzy penthouse. A poor woman in the boondocks gives birth to a mudfish. Dead lovers buried beneath a hotel ruined by an earthquake reach out to each other. And a woman poisoned in Scotland centuries ago still haunts a hilltop castle, looking for her dead lover.

These and other memorable characters inhabit Danton Remoto’s book of stories and tales. Some of the stories are written in the realistic mode. They poke fun at a colourful but violent dictatorship or track the same-sex love in a young man’s heart. The others are written in the fantastic mode-fables, parables, origin tales, cheeky rewriting of rural lore and urban legends. The length of the stories also varies. Some are flash fiction, while the others have the sweep of a novella.

The stories are meant to entertain but also to instruct: why the present is just a re-looping of the past, why love remains constant and true even beyond death. Written with daring and with dash, this book comes from the pen of ‘one of Asia’s best writers’.

This novel asks the questions about the role of women in marriage, the burden of cultural inheritance, the oppression inherent in being a minority and ultimately, the costs of not being true to oneself.
Set in the 2010s of Singapore, the story begins with protagonist, Saloma Salem, an entrepreneur who believes that her ethnicity has impeded her success in life. As a result, she steadfastly rejects her race and culture.
This strains her relationship with her mother who still lives alone in their small family flat. Determined to be independent, she leads a simple life despite Saloma’s generous allowance. Their fractious relationship breaks down when she forces her antiquated beliefs about a wife’s role on Saloma. The story tells how far Saloma would go to deny her culture, the efforts she takes to save her marriage and to maintain the image of a perfect life. But her plans go awry, forcing her to confront her own demons.

An immortal spirit cycles through multiple lives as a tree, a naga, a deer, a rock, and a human. A doctor suffers a stroke and embarks upon a quest for justice in the afterlife. A wife and mother lives out the soap opera of her dreams. A ghostwriter deals with the violent tragedy that befalls his family by turning it into fiction. A woman from the future struggles to break free from a life shaped by her lineage.

The Fabulist is an epic novel by Uthis Haemamool. Spooling out of the district of Kaeng Khoi in Saraburi, Thailand, this book follows four generations of narrative threads as they bluff, conceal, confess, and rewrite themselves into the history of a nation that has long relegated them to the margins of its story.

Set in Singapore, this is a tale about Rose, her relentless pursuit of success and money and the price that she pays for it. The enormous wealth that she accumulates loses its meaning for her when disillusionment with her failed marriages and guilt about her own perceived failure as a parent torment her. She eventually gains wisdom and peace through two unlikely women, connected to her past.