Tag: holiday reads

It’s that time of the year when summer is in full swing and readers want light summer reads, books to take on vacation, stories that will accompany you on rainy days and more. Whether you’re traveling, sheltering from the heat with the A/C on full blast, or enjoying a rainy afternoon with a cup of tea, June’s literary offerings promise a journey for every kind of reader.

This month, we bring you a diverse and thought-provoking selection. From multigenerational sagas and poignant queer narratives to sharp romantic comedies and timely geopolitical analysis. Here are the books releasing this month: 

This novel follows the life of Jon, a Filipino gay man and his coming out of the closet in conservative and Catholic Philippines. He becomes a journalist and lives briefly in the United Kingdom and the United States, but returns home to a colourful country that is beginning to change.  

He forges friendships and alliances in gay Manila, meets and break ups with lovers, and lives with eyes wide open to the possibilities of hope.  

Here you will get a narrative line that is enriched with different prose forms like vignettes, poems, songs, speeches, reviews, feature articles, portraits of people and sketches of places. 

Ah Lam is married off to Cheng Lei, the son of a wealthy merchant, to help improve her family’s situation as she is of age. Ming Zhu, Ah Lam’s daughter, befriends a wealthy Muslim Javanese entrepreneur family and falls for Arya, an aspiring scholar, whom she later marries despite her parents’ disagreement for their different cultural and religious backgrounds under the authoritarian New Order regime. Dido, one of Ming Zhu’s twin children and a Peranakan woman, faces gender and cultural challenges as she is torn between her hybrid ethnicity and cultural roots while growing up in the disorienting Reformasi era and riots. 

This is a story of three generations of women in Indonesia which talks about what happens when intergenerational trauma and family memories haunt their lives and ties to others.  

After witnessing the relationships from the two closest people in her life fall apart, Clara was determined not to be the curse’s next victim by avoiding the root cause: falling in love with cliché love interests. 

Leading up to college, Clara has managed to avoid getting stuck in situations that will cause her to spend more time than necessary with a cliché love interest. But when she accidentally arrived late to the first day of ASL class, her streak came to an end when Colton Reed, the college star baseball player ended up sitting next to her.  

Escaping the curse was going to be a lot more difficult than she thought it would be. 

An era of great power rivalry made the rise of Southeast Asia possible. It stimulated common purpose and unity among nations and led to the creation and consolidation of ASEAN.

The question now is, will the return of geopolitics have a similar impact? This is no means assured. In fact, the opposite could happen. The new geopolitics is, after all, quite different from the old. Developments affecting Southeast Asia’s reputation and appeal might destroy ‘Southeast Asia’ not just as a distinct idea, but also as pawns in the hands of great powers. 

With so many interestingly crafted stories, we know it can be hard to choose which one to read first. But the good thing is that you get to read all! Stay tuned on our Instagram to know when they release.