If you eat while lying down, you will turn into a snake. If you don’t polish off all the rice on your plate you will marry a man full of pimples and pockmarks.
Looking After the Ashes is a semi-biographical fiction of Kopi Soh’s childhood stories. Growing up in a large extended Taoist influenced Peranakan family filled with strong women, Kopi hears these words of ‘wisdom’ daily. She used to live in a world where clipping finger nails at night was strictly forbidden, pointing at the moon would result in one’s ears getting chopped off, and children were forced to stay indoors during sundown for fear of collision with evil forces. A world where mental disorders and illnesses were believed to be caused by malevolent spirits. Talisman, mediums and fortune tellers were a part of everyday life.
Archives: Books
Two Figures in a Car and Other Stories
Two figures sit in a car, waiting to commit a crime. A young girl steals her grandmother’s jade bracelet. A Malay man collects the blonde hair of a British teenager he is transfixed with, and a young woman feeds human blood to a frangipani tree.
There’s right and wrong in this world. Or is there? This collection of fourteen stories explores the grey and amoral lives of ordinary – and not so ordinary – Malaysians and Singaporeans looking to carve their place in the world.
Shifting between the dark hills of Penang island to the lonely coasts of Singapore and the cramped corners of Kuala Lumpur and Manchester, Two Figures in a Car is coloured with petty crimes, small ambitions and fantastical delusions.
Coaching
This book lucidly illustrates how a leader can bring out the very best in people by coaching them, and how coaching can unleash creativity as well as innovation while inspiring teams to play to their potential. It also examines how coaching helps leaders maintain a fine balance between managing and guiding, and between appraising and supporting their teammates. While many excellent books have been written about leadership, talent and coaching, this is a rare book that stands boldly at the intersection of leadership and coaching.
This is a book for our times. Businesses are facing a new reality, characterized by a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world. This new reality has forced organizations to depart from conventional command-and-control practices to a completely new model – a model in which leaders support and guide, rather than instruct and control, their team members. Exploring some of the key ingredients of impactful leadership, Coaching offers tips
and tricks, backed by research and incisive insights, on how to become an effective leader-coach. Peppered with interesting anecdotes and analogies, drawn from sports, performing arts and other walks of life, the book is a breezy read. Interviews with corporate leaders and academics further enrich the narrative. Guaranteed to make for a very interesting read, the book will be useful to leaders, aspiring leaders and especially those that wish to transition from being just good leaders to extraordinary ones.
Song of the Sacred Mountain
A seventeen-year-old academic prodigy from a small village in central Java, Lestari wants nothing more than to become a modern, self-determined woman. But she swims against powerful currents. Raised by her father, the revered guardian of an active volcano, she joins the many offerings to the sacred mountain yet begins to question their effectiveness. The more Lestari learns about science and geology, it seems, the less she believes in ritual.
When a young Dutch entrepreneur arrives in their village to explore Indonesia’s potential for geothermal energy, Lestari befriends and falls for the charming stranger, and the rift between father and daughter widens. In the weeks leading up to her high school graduation, the volcano begins to erupt, blanketing the village in ash. Shockingly, a set a tiger prints is discovered in the dust, sending villagers into a panic.
What follows is the haunting, unforgettable story of a daughter’s search for truth and a father’s unyielding loyalty. It is about the courage to question tradition, the faith to uphold it, and the love that ultimately binds them together.
An impressive debut novel, Song of the Sacred Mountain is nothing short of a triumph, an enduring, cautionary tale of a daughter’s doubt, a father’s faith, and a love that refuses to die.
Beyond Storms and Stars – A Memoir
How did a young girl who rose from underprivileged circumstances in post-war Singapore become a trailblazer of women’s global leadership at the United Nations? Noeleen Heyzer was the first woman from outside North America to be appointed as Executive Director of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and the first woman Executive Secretary of the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP). In these memoirs, Noeleen Heyzer reflects on her remarkable journey – from the challenges of her childhood and youth, her intellectual development at the University of Singapore and the University of Cambridge, to her groundbreaking work on women’s empowerment and her meteoric rise to the position of Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations. It is a book that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the courage of individuals, communities, and societies to transform structures of discrimination and injustice.
Mist-bound
Winner of the Hedwig Anuar Children’s Book Award 2022
Winner of the Best Young Persons Title at the Singapore Book Awards 2022
Can a girl, armed only with stories, make her way through a land of myth, magic and monsters, to save her grandfather’s shattered memories before they’re forever lost?
His only cure? Memory Glue. To brew it, Alexis just needs eight ingredients: stuff like, nose hair from a baku (dream-eater), sweat from a duyung (sea siren) and … OK. Maybe some are tricky to find in local supermarkets.
To obtain them Alexis must journey to a realm where the fabled creatures from Grandpa’s folktales are alive in the flesh (and often flesh-eating).
At least she’ll have fun company: the nasty kenit (forest imp) who’d cast the horrible spell on Grandpa, and her no-nonsense Grandma, who harbours a secret that will change Alexis’ life forever …
Piece of cake, right?
Oh, there’s also a deadline.
Can Grandpa be saved before he’s forever lost to the mists within his mind?
Based on a true story.
That Night
Natasha, Riya, Anjali and Katherine were best friends in college – each different from the other yet inseparable – until that night. It was the night that began with a bottle of whisky and a game of Ouija but ended with the death of Sania, their unlikeable hostel mate. The friends vowed never to discuss that fateful night, a pact that had kept their friendship and guilt dormant for the last twenty years. But now, someone has begun to mess with them, threatening to reveal the truth that only Sania knew. Is it a hacker playing on their guilt or has Sania’s ghost really returned to avenge her death?
As the faceless enemy closes in on them, the friends come together once again to recount what really happened that night. But when the story is retold by each of them, the pieces don’t fit. Because none of them is telling the whole truth . . .
That Night is a dark, twisted tale of friendship and betrayal that draws you in and confounds you at every turn.
Whispers of Hope
As a British teenager, I meet a beautiful Burmese girl on the school bus. Her family self-exiled in 1964, soon after the military coup, to start a new life in England. My fascination is fired for this far-off land.
How did Burma, with such a regal past, swathed in natural beauty and populated by a people of unmistakable poise and serenity slide into repression and obscurity? How can the up-beat memories of April’s parents be reconciled with Myanmar’s current malaise?
Over 16 years I recorded the oral history, anecdotes and reminiscences of her family who were eye witnesses to momentous events in mid-century Burma. These together with more recent conversations – with Aung San Suu Kyi and a range of Burmese millennials – provide a unique portrait of Myanmar stretching back to April’s great, great grandfather in 1852.
For all the woes of this country, whispers of hope can be heard.
Enrique the Black
Who was the man they called Enrique the Black?
Taken from his family, and forced into slavery during the Portuguese invasion of Malacca in 1511, the Malay boy rechristened as Enrique must quickly to adapt to a new religion, and to the strange new lands of Portugal and Spain.
A decade later his master Ferdinand Magellan, dreaming of fame and fortune, has an audacious plan to sail to the other side of the world, on a seemingly quick, uncharted route to the Moluccas Spice Islands. Enrique will prove invaluable once they arrive there, as he alone speaks the islanders’ Malay language.
What no one in Magellan’s fleet can foresee though, is how giants, bad weather, mutiny and excruciating hunger haunt their every move.
Even more dangerous however, is Magellan’s own religious fervour, which threatens to undo the entire expedition once they arrive at the islands soon to be known as the Philippines, where Enrique will face certain death, and perhaps the chance to finally taste freedom.
Two Sides of A Lie
This story is inspired by real events.
It was a chilly September evening when the body of a young pro-democracy protester surfaced in Hong Kong’s eastern Yau Tong Bay. The local police quickly concluded his death as accidental drowning but fellow protesters believe it was part of a dark ploy by the authorities to quash the political movement.
James Lai, the Han Herald’s senior reporter, is assigned to investigate the mysterious death. Unbeknownst to him, the assignment is a front created by his editors to shift the narrative against leaders in Beijing, unnerved by the intensified public opinion. As he digs deeper, he finds himself coming to close brush with the forces of a power struggle among the Party’s top brass. His pursuit of the truth challenges his personal and professional integrity at every step of the way. Faced with a politically-pressured media environment in Hong Kong and the Herald newsroom that has declined from a once globally respected publication to a propaganda mouthpiece, James can only trust his own journalistic beliefs and dogged reporting to piece together the mystery and bring the story to life.
Nonetheless, the answers he uncovers of the conspiracy are more sinister than he could have imagined.