“We are going to help him die Cassie,” Shantavi told me that afternoon, over steaming cups of soy milk latte, as casually as if announcing a gardening project.
Cassie was an international student at Harvard, the most prestigious university in the world. She was shy and observant, yet underneath her quiet disposition was a desire to experience the world to the fullest, beyond her traditional boundaries and limitations.
One fateful night at the university campus, a free-spirited, daredevil student from the extension school named Shantavi came into her life and they became fast friends over the next four years.
In the spring semester of Cassie’s senior year, Shantavi disclosed to her that she was looking for a partner-in-crime to consort with a wealthy elderly benefactor who planned to kill himself in a year’s time. In exchange for companionship and assistance in the suicide process, they would inherit all his assets and properties after his death.
Thus began the premise for a thrillingly seductive spiral down a rabbit hole over the spring break in Florida, where Cassie inevitably had to cross a point of no return.
Phoebe Wong would do anything to escape a British winter. But it may cost her more than her airfare.
Sunsets, tacos and margaritas all sound perfect to exhausted forty-three-year-old single mum Phoebe with a dead-end job in Southwark. When her long distance boyfriend in New York invites her to meet him in Florida, she couldn’t wait to jump on a plane with her toddler. Arriving with her teething child at her boyfriend’s Key West ‘vacay home’ before him, she is robbed on her first night. With no money, cards or passports, she is grateful for the support of friendly locals. At a BBQ, she meets an old expat British businessman. Her boyfriend arrives eventually, apologetic, and takes her out to a posh seafood dinner. But when the British expat is shot that night in the same restaurant’s car park, Phoebe is trapped in a put-up job, and her boyfriend’s delayed arrival is suspiciously timed. If this place has turned darker and chillier than London, she wants out.
Will she be able to pull herself and her daughter away from danger?
In modern-day China, a man has travelled to Shanghai on impulse to meet his online lover Luna, but she refuses to see him and soon disappears without a trace. He tries to forget her by immersing himself in dating apps, and also learns to appreciate the nuances within everyday Chinese life while he adjusts himself to mainland China as a member of the greater overseas Chinese diaspora. As the seasons change he falls in love with a budding photographer named Sofia, but with traces of Luna constantly reappearing in his life, will he ever find a way out of his unquiet predicament?
Unquiet Heart Soliloquy is Dano Chow’s debut novel, a confessional account of one’s turning to dating apps for comfort in times of loneliness, in the hope that one casual outing after another will somehow be enough to fulfil a generational desire for intimacy.
Four people from the tiny, wealthy, hypermodern nation of Singapore visit a remote village in the heart of China. It’s almost forty years since the end of a great famine, hardly known to the world outside China, but psychic echoes of that agony still reverberate through the cosmos. It is the Singaporeans’ task to try to heal that spiritual trauma. When the dead have been universally recognised and mourned for, the ‘hungry ghosts’ will be at peace.
The four are Peter, Katrina, Lumy and Alex: a cripple, a yuppie, a tai-tai and a businessman. On their quest they grow in self-understanding and wisdom, through the guidance of a good spirit named Bezalia.
The story is an amusing closeup of Singaporeans as you’ve never seen them before: four insular people confronting cosmic issues, pragmatists on a spiritual quest. It is also a declaration that transcendence is within everyone’s reach.
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.
A story told in three parts, Teacher Narit is a historical novel centering on the main protagonist, Narit, a mysterious civil war veteran who escaped the capital in the 70s to start a new life as a history teacher in northern Thailand.
Once a young, idealistic postgraduate student and activist during one of Thailand’s blackest periods, The 14th October 1973 revolution, Narit embarked on a turbulent relationship that led him to battling a war of conscience, love and political allegiance; a war that ended in pain and disillusion for both him and his family-leaving him embittered, running from his past.
However, it is in northern Thailand, that a chance encounter with his first love forces him to confront his demons, and Narit is made to choose between seeking forgiveness or fleeing once more.
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’.
