It’s a rare collection of short stories works as well as Reshma Ruia’s Mrs Pinto Drives to Happiness: each of her stories is captivating without any that seem weaker than the others. The characters come from a variety of countries and continents, although most are of Indian descent. The overarching theme in these stories is…
Although there is a huge amount of fiction covering the Indian diaspora, it is more usually set in Western countries, including Australia, than in Malaya, as it was, and Singapore. In Kopi, Puffs & Dreams, a finalist for the Epigram Books Fiction Prize, Pallavi Gopinath Aney explores the experience of Indian immigrants to Singapore in…
Cat and her friends are in Japan for a long weekend thanks to their high school friend, Phillip. Talia and Faiz, two of the friends, are engaged and want to relive their teenage stunts of visiting haunted houses in Kuala Lumpur. Phillip flies them, along with their friend, Lin, first class tickets from different parts…
Belonging—either to another person, a family or a nation—is the key theme of this exquisite coming-of-age novel from British-Asian writer Selma Carvalho. Carvalho has published three non-fiction books which document the Goan migration to colonial East Africa. Her intimate understanding of the diasporic experience shines through every page as she explores her characters’ search for…
“I’m going to tell you the truth,” begins the narrator on the first page of Kim Thúy’s latest, Em, “but only partially, incompletely, more or less.” To put an even finer emphasis on the point, she tells us a couple pages later, that “truth “is fragmented”—as indeed it must be when dealing with a topic…
Qaraar Ali is a young craftsman in love with the beautiful Abeerah, cherished daughter of a General in the Mughal army. A wanderer, he seeks the company of poets and spends his time visiting the shrines of 18th century Delhi. Trouble is brewing as Persia’s Nadir Shah is gathering a large army and heading towards…
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the courageous Soviet dissident and Nobel Prize-winning author of the Gulag Archipelago who died in 2008, considered The Red Wheel his most important work. Its ten volumes cover Russia from pre-World War I days to the fall of the Romanov dynasty and the early months of the 1917 Russian Revolution. The Red Wheel…
Neither the “Indian abroad” nor the “gaijin in Japan” novel are particularly rare, but by making an intra-Asian combination of these two, Sarayu Srivatsa has, with her latest novel That Was, turned these two sub-genres on their head.
The word ganbaru is ubiquitous in Japanese culture. Roughly translated, it means “persistence”, “tenacity” or “hard work”. When junior high students cram for high school entrance exams, their parents remind them, “Ganbatte!” When a 1995 earthquake killed 6,500 people and irreparably damaged more than 400,000 buildings in Kobe, the government urged people on: “Ganbaro!”
Fifty-Five Pillars, Red Walls, Usha Priyamvada’s debut novel, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, is a seminal work of feminist literature, and a cult classic among middle-class Hindi readers. Released in 1961, the book is one of the most well-known literary pieces set in Delhi, and one of the first translations to come from Indian…
With its opening scene of a hard-boiled interrogation of murder suspect Han Manu, Lemon seems to be setting the reader up for yet another rote exercise in crime fiction. And the reader follows the cues, according to convention: skeptically receiving the detective’s attributions of guilt to a clearly confused Manu, suspecting that the murder of…
If you happen to have a few hours to spare and a swash to buckle, here are two rousing epic adventures from Persia and the Middle East to fill in the time. If we think of Persian epics, the two titles which probably come to mind are Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and Vis and Ramin by Fakhruddin…
Wu Shih-sheng is a taxi driver, sinking in debt and living in a cockroach-infested metal shack in the outskirts of Taipei with his wife, Hsiang-ying. When she dies in a mental hospital, after claiming to have been hearing the voice of a ghost threatening her life and that of their daughter, Shih-sheng decides to dig…
Diversity, even—or perhaps especially—Asian diversity, in crime novels and dramatizations is of course nothing new: Inspector Ganesh Ghote first appeared in 1964; Priyanka Chopra debuted in Quantico in 2015. But, mirroring the real world, there is now diversity within the diversity. Bloody Foreigners, Neil Humphreys’s latest “Inspector Low” novel, this time has the bipolar Singapore…
Teenager Benny Oh has just lost his father, a Japanese-American jazz clarinetist. His mother, Annabelle, too, struggles with her grief. As a few years pass, Annabelle lets their home fill with the clutter of things she thinks will fill the emptiness her husband left behind. It is surely never comfortable to live with someone who…