Archives: Books

Kuang was five years old when he first arrived in Singapore from Shantou, China. Reunited with his abusive good-for-nothing grandfather and a new step-grandmother, Kuang and his parents struggled to live with dignity while battling poverty. When he became the eldest brother to seven siblings, greater responsibilities weighed on his shoulders. He gave up his education and worked as a fish porridge hawker assistant to help the family make ends meet. Twists and turns in his life eventually brought him back to his hometown cuisine. How did he derive a unique recipe of his own? How did he realise his dream of becoming a successful Teochew braised duck rice seller?

The Muse and Other Stories is a collection of dark stories from the author of Not A Monster and Without Anchovies.
An elderly editor discovers the secret of an author and his muse, and tries to save him from the curse of a vengeful spirit.
The Afterlife is in great trouble, and a young man is enlisted by a high-ranking demon to save it.
A deceased murderer is offered the salvation of his soul, but only if he is willing to commit another murder.
After an encounter with a long-lost childhood friend, a young woman discovers the horrific truth about her father.
A young man is tormented by his unborn child.
These unsettling stories confronts not only the supernatural elements that surround us, but the darkness of our hearts.
The scariest part is often the consequences of the choices made by ordinary persons like us.

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.