It’s August of 1931 in Singapore, sixteen-year-old Lim Mei Mei (Ah Mei) arrives at the home of Eminent Mister Lee on the eve of the Hungry Ghost Month. She has been sold to the family as a mui tsai, an indentured servant girl. At the Lee household, Lim Mei Mei’s life education begins. There she encounters the spirit of Ah Lian, a mui tsai, who paid the ultimate price for her mistake. Through Ah Lian, Ah Mei discovers the plight of mui tsai, who are both helpless and powerful, and uncovers a shameful secret lurking in the shadows in the Lee house. Ah Mei also meets and falls in love with Hassan Mohamed, an Indian-Muslim and an aspiring poet, breaking every clause in the rule book of love in 1930s British Malaya. She becomes Hassan’s Polar Star, and the young lovers must find a way to stay together. Through a twist of fate, Ah Mei finds a solution that will keep her and Hassan together, at the same time gaining agency that will secure her own future as an uneducated servant girl in British Malaya.
Archives: Books
The Widening of Tolo Highway
ANNA RETURNS TO FACE A PAST
SHE NEVER TRULY LEFT BEHIND
It wasn’t the middle but the very edge of nowhere.
It was always just a little too still.
It is 2017. Typhoon Hato has ripped through the streets of Hong Kong. National Day is looming. The momentum of the 2014 Umbrella Revolution has faded. British woman, Anna, has returned to her old village in the New Territories to search for Kallum, a disillusioned local activist, from whom she has heard nothing since her departure two years ago.
Suspecting he was targeted for his involvement in the protests, Anna widens her search, scouring the streets of Kowloon and the Island for signs he is alive. Alone in her tiny, rented room in the notorious Chungking Mansions, gruesome flashbacks disturb her sleep. Paranoia swells. Memory, delusion, and reality begin to blur.
Against a backdrop of construction works, storm damage and scaffolding, Anna is confronted by a daunting panorama. She may know more about the past than she’s let herself believe.
Emman, Time Traveller
Emmanuel was in school when he received a strange visitor. It seems that no one but Emman could see the boy who was dressed in an old-fashioned Malay outfit. When Emman approached him, the boy ‘spoke’ to Emman telepathically to tell him that he was The One. When Emman asked him The One what? The boy said, The One to save him. The boy made an urgent plea to Emman to help him, then dashed away hastily. A magic portal opened up and the boy stepped through it and disappeared.
Before he left, the boy had told Emman to attend a talk called The Redhill Tragedy. Curious, Emman searched online and found the talk to be at the National Museum. He asked his Peranakan, paternal grandmother to attend with him. The talk was about a boy Nadim, who was killed in the Redhill Tragedy. Suddenly, the boy Emman saw before, appeared again, telling Emman he was Nadim. He persuaded Emman to save him.
But what could Emman do? Nadim had lived and died in the 14th century Singapura. How could he undo history? And how would he be able to get back to the 14th Century to prevent Nadim’s murder? When he posed his dilemma to his Grandmother, Grandma surprised him by telling him that she can show him a way. But first he must have the courage to accept the quest.
Too Far From Antibes
It is 1951, and Jean-Luc Guéry has arrived in Indochina to investigate the murder of his brother, Olivier, whose body was found floating in a tributary of the Saigon River. As an avid reader of detective fiction, Guéry is well aware of how such investigations should proceed, but it is not immediately clear that he is capable of putting this knowledge into practice. In addition to being a reporter for an obscure provincial newspaper, he is also a failed writer, an incorrigible alcoholic, and a compulsive gambler who has already squandered a fortune in the casinos of the Côte d’Azur. Despite his dissolute tendencies, however, and his aversion to physical danger, Guéry does eventually manage to solve the case. In order to do so, he is obliged to enter a world of elaborate conspiracies, clandestine intelligence operations, and organized crime – only to discover, in the novel’s final pages, that the truth behind his brother’s murder is far stranger than he could have imagined.
Written in the style of Graham Greene and Eric Ambler, Too Far From Antibes is a ‘retro’ thriller that brilliantly evokes the city of Saigon during the early 1950s, when it was a centre of intrigue, insurgency, and empire.
The Zero Season
It is 1949, and young Etienne Legast is in trouble. Estranged from his pious Catholic family, having fled a messy love affair with an older man at the end of the war, he returns home to Paris for a funeral, only to find himself quick drawn into a deadly debt to a neighborhood gangster and an unexpected romance with Samphan, an orphaned Cambodian student radical. Though the two young men come from different worlds, they soon develop a bond that helps them transcend their respective tragedies – until revolutionary political intrigues and the Parisian underworld threaten to pull them under once more.
Of Myths and Men
Eighteen-year-old Ava has saved the world 152 times – ever since she got her hands on her first console. It’s all fun and games, but after a mysterious encounter with not-a-vampire Brad, she discovers that the mythological creatures she’s only ever seen in video games are actually totally real. Brad reveals they’re alien refugees living among humans – bonus points because Ava finds the guy really, really cute.
As she’s suddenly thrust into a quest with a surfer wendigo, a friendly manananggal, a telepathic nine-tailed fox, a Sudoku-loving centaur, and a huggable Bigfoot, Ava embarks on an actual mission to fend off an alien invasion – and she soon realizes that this time, she just might need to save the world for real.
Where’s a save point when you need one?
Prophecy of the Underworld
When the prophesied hero dies one day before the world needs saving, 13-year-old Julian Kee is randomly chosen as a last-minute replacement. With absolutely no world-saving skills whatsoever, he must nonetheless lead his friends into the Underworld to retrieve a magical rock that can save their world.
The problem is that the ruling council of the Underworld objects to their quest, and the rock can only be obtained by passing through a series of terrible trials, including navigating an unsolvable maze, enduring unspeakable tortures in the dungeons of the council’s citadel, and facing a really cute bunny. And is the Underworlder who cheerfully volunteers to risk her life to help them simply a girl with a very kind, selfless heart, or is she really a spy for the council?
A fast-paced adventure filled with lots of exciting twists and turns, this hilarious spoof of adventure/hero stories will be enjoyed by both the young and the not-so-young!
The Unvisible
Alex, a struggling journalism student, begins a school project about children’s stories of invisible friends.
Because of her project, Alex gets invited to a secret society-Carte Blanche-that studies the existence of an invisible human race.
The more she learns, the more she starts to be intrigued by the possibility of these stories actually being real.
Alex learns that anyone who reveals the existence of The Unvisible will be killed, because The Unvisible know that humans will kill them if they found out about The Unvisible. Humans kill everything that we perceive to be a threat to our existence.
As Alex gets drawn into the alluring world of The Unvisible, she also needs to fight with the trauma of having her world view turned upside down, and the profound loneliness that comes from not being allowed to share humanity’s biggest secret. With feelings of inferiority and doubt she struggles to take the lead to save herself, her family-and humanity.
Life is Beautiful. Death is Imminent.
The Apple and the Tree
When an apple falls, does it roll far or stay close to its tree?
Is it an exact clone of all the other apples the tree produces or something entirely different?
This is the question that has perplexed the public about Marina for the simple reason that she is the daughter of the man who has governed Malaysia for almost twenty-four years. Does she echo him in his view of the world, or does she chart her own path?
Why is it that in her own public life, in her writing and speeches, she expresses opinions that seem to contradict his?
This book hopes to detail how she has navigated her life as the daughter of a charismatic politician and a loving father, even as sometimes she has chafed at being constantly under his shadow. It talks about how she has struggled to find her own identity, to defend her worldview at times and to reconcile them with his at others.
She tells the story of growing up as the daughter of Malaysia’s most influential leader, from the values instilled in her as a child, right up to the day he was forced to step down as the 7th Prime Minister after leading the historic ouster of the government he used to lead.
The Raffles Affair
Fresh from a gruelling three-month assignment in East Africa, beautiful former MI6 agent Victoria West arrives at Raffles Hotel in Singapore to attend her friend’s wedding. But Victoria’s plans for a relaxing break end abruptly with news that the groom has been kidnapped. Warned not to contact the police, Victoria sets out to find him. But in this glamorous setting, nothing is quite what it seems. As the deadline to pay the ransom draws near, events take a deadly turn. Victoria suspects murder. But which of the wedding guests did it? They all have a motive… and a talent for lying. With time fast running out, Victoria must untangle the web of domestic squabbles, red herrings and false alibis before it is too late.