Rich in detail and the range of characters it features, The Unrepentant is as an impressive collection of 14 short stories that sheds light on the diversity of life and experiences in the Malay peninsula and Singapore during and in the aftermath of the Malayan Emergency (1948-1960), in which the communist pro-independence movement conducted guerilla…
War, in No Man River, is an endless affair. Sprawling from the 1950s to the 1970s, the novel follows a close-knit cast of characters in a northern Vietnamese village from the end of the war for independence from the French colonial power to the war between north and south Vietnam. As fathers, brothers, sons headed to…
A mere 120 pages long, Kwan Ann Tan’s choose-your-own-adventure novella, The Waiter, offers more than just adventure. Set in a near-future London that is infested with spontaneously opening and closing sinkholes—or “maws”—the book invites readers to step into the shoes of an unnamed Waiter, whose job it is to complete time-consuming, unproductive tasks on behalf…
Nine years in the making, Jemimah Wei’s debut novel is a complicated story of two sisters who found and lost each other amidst the busy, urban, competitive island of Singapore. It provides a glimpse of Singapore without the glitz and glamour, a Singapore in which the expectation of excellence drives a wedge through even the…
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and what is now celebrated in Vietnam as the unification of the country. Outside of Vietnam, this anniversary is tinted with stories of exile, of loss and trauma, of surviving in a new country and culture, where Vietnamese voices often go unheard. The Cleaving…
A collection of 49 poems of varying forms, from scattered verses to prose poetry, Primordial is more than the sum of its parts. Mai Der Vang, equipped with the eloquence and talent for crafting vivid imagery that had made her previous collection a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, brings together the overlaying experiences of the…
A new addition to the catalogue of stories about the Vietnamese diaspora, Khuê Phạm’s Brothers and Ghosts (translated, somewhat unusually, from the original German to English by Charles Hawley and Daryl Lindsey) follows the three intertwining stories of Kiều, a Vietnamese German journalist, her father Minh who arrived in Germany in 1968, and of her…
Migration, especially in literature, is normally seen as having “the West” as its destination. Migration within Asia, from the less affluent to richer places, appears far less often. Singapore, for example, has had a long history as a trading port drawing in merchants and laborers from East Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. Singapore’s colonial…
Nguyễn Ngọc Tư’s second novel, and the first to be rendered in English by Nguyễn An Lý opens with a mysterious description.