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.
Catagory: Fiction
The Fabulist
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.
The Mandarin Rose
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.
The Last Great Love Song
Northern Malaya, 1825. Princess Toh has been left in charge of the palace while her brother is away fighting, but her violent husband is causing trouble in her court. Meanwhile, Aashif, who was trekking through the jungle, stumbles upon a girl who has been brutally assaulted and left to die. Back at the palace, the traumatised young man decides to escape and seek freedom; together with Princess Toh’s maid, he sets out on a perilous journey. Distraught at this news, Toh pledges to do anything she can to bring the runaways home – even if that means resorting to help from the magical spirits that guard the kingdom. And all the while, a murderer is on the loose…
The Last Great Love Song is a magical tale of secrets and lies, a bewitching story that will convince the reader of the power of love – and magic.
The Snow in Kuala Lumpur
Malaysia in the 1960s. A newly independent nation, full of early promise.
On the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, young Ah Tat dreams of a life beyond the kampong. Earnest, bookish and a little naïve, he sees his path clearly: he will study hard at the Methodist school, enter university and one day become a man of consequence. It is his duty to guide his wayward cousin, the darkly charismatic KC, on a similar path to success. But when KC’s fascination with the local triads results in his sudden disappearance, Ah Tat is left with nothing but questions and regrets.
Years later, the estranged cousins are reunited in a much-changed country. Ah Tat, now a successful engineer and future captain of industry, discovers KC has become a powerful underworld figure. Vowing to haul his cousin back from the moral abyss, he is instead drawn into an escalating rivalry with KC as the two men vie for wealth, status, influence and the love of the enigmatic June Teh.
But could a bizarre weather event stay the inevitable reckoning?
The Snow in Kuala Lumpur is a tale of two men-fierce adversaries who ought to have been brothers-and two peoples, the Malays and Chinese, who forged a new nation while walking the thin line between kinship and a destructive rivalry.
Salvaged from the Fall
EVERY DAY of the years of a murderous occupation, Simone has kept her head down, living and working in the peaceful surroundings of the Botanical Gardens ignoring the horrors that lie outside, waiting for it all to end.
UNTIL TODAY, when a blue feather reminds her of lost friends and sends her on a quest which can lead them all into disaster.
Against the clock and with a Japanese officer on their trail, seven young women are called on to rekindle their bonds of loyalty and trust to save the child of one of their own.
No Wonder, Women
Two women bond over a balloon cactus. A mother steals glances at her teenage daughter in the rear-view mirror. A bride misses her best friend on the eve of her wedding. An open support group for women who think too much. What is woman’s love? No Wonder, Women is an ode to women-to hearts that love fiercely and feel deeply. A glimpse into the lives of women who are trying to love without unloving themselves.
Changi: A Mystery
Violet has organised her life in Singapore with a zeal that keeps her family close by her side, and any intimacy safely at bay. While she chases the attention of a German doctor, her daughter and her friends spend their days lost in a hollow world of make believe, memories, and old Agatha Christie novels.
But a death shatters Violet’s grip on the world around her. Was this murder, accident, or suicide? With the authorities drawing closer the family have just hours to try and piece together what really happened. Is this a puzzle, a tragedy, or a crime? Is Violet’s role to bring the truth to light, or bury it alongside the rest of Changi camp’s grizzly history?
Over the next 48 hours, Violet will find out once and for all whether her efforts to control her family’s lives have protected them, or simply left them at the mercy of someone else’s stories.
Changi is a story of obsession, revenge and jealousy that mixes stark emotional power with elements of a classic whodunit.
A Market for Murder
The Das sisters investigate a counterfeit computer chip syndicate operating out of Asia, to whom murder is a means of protecting business interests. A private plane crashes. A heart pacemaker malfunctions. Only one man in Singapore realizes counterfeit computer chips sold on the black market may be to blame.
He sets on a mission to expose the crime syndicate. When he is murdered, the Das sisters must hunt down his killers.
The third of the Das Sisters Mystery Series finds ASP Dolly Das and her sister, Lily, confronted by two murder cases at once.
The sisters’ holiday in Bali is cut short by the murder of a Singaporean guest at their hotel. A simple case of a robbery gone wrong takes on sinister overtones when they realize the guest may have been the target of a hit by an organised crime syndicate dealing in counterfeit computer chips. Back in Singapore, a member of the murdered man’s family is found strangled. Are the two murders connected? As suspects mysteriously disappear or are killed, and the possibility of police corruption rears its ugly head, the Das sisters are challenged as never before. The sisters, with the help of their mother, Uma, Dolly’s husband, Joey, assistants, Angie and Vernon and the domestic helper, Girlie take risks to bring down the syndicate and find the killers. Jealousy festers when one sister upstages the other. Is this the end of the road for the Das sisters working as a team?
Destination: SEA 2050 A.D.
Destination: SEA 2050 A.D. the first Southeast Asian fiction anthology that imagines-based on scientific projections-the world of the year 2050, the same year when 90 percent of the planet’s coral reefs are expected to decline, when plastic is found inside 99 percent of all the world’s seabirds, when there is severe water shortage in Asia, when growth in the world’s populations stops, and when the elderly outnumber children in most places on Earth.
Short stories and graphic narratives from a veritable literary supergroup from all over Southeast Asia and with each story painstakingly annotated, will paint a vivid, often disquieting but at times hopeful, vision of an environmental futurist spread. Destination: SEA 2050 A.D. is a travel through time and into the heartland of the global conversation on the final stages of the sixth extinction.