SE Asia

New Non-Fiction Books
New Book Announcement: “Seaways and Gatekeepers: Trade and State in the Eastern Archipelagos of Southeast Asia, c 1600 – c 1906” by Heather Sutherland
5 August 2021
The eastern archipelagos stretch from Mindanao and Sulu in the north to Bali in the southwest and New Guinea in the southeast. Many of their inhabitants are regarded as “people without history”, while colonial borders cut across shared underlying patterns. Yet many of these societies were linked to trans-oceanic trading systems for millennia. Indeed, some…
Read More New Book Announcement: “Seaways and Gatekeepers: Trade and State in the Eastern Archipelagos of Southeast Asia, c 1600 – c 1906” by Heather Sutherland
Podcast
Podcast with Catherine Menon, author of “Fragile Monsters”
3 June 20218 August 2021
The year is 1985. Durga is visiting her grandmother Mary in rural Malaysia. It’s not a particularly happy occasion: Mary is tough and sharp-tongued, and “home” sparks bad memories for Durga.
Read More Podcast with Catherine Menon, author of “Fragile Monsters”
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New Book Announcement: “Joseph Conrad’s ‘Eastern Voyages’: Tales of Singapore and an East Borneo River” by Ian Burnet
20 April 2021
Joseph Conrad’s favored destination was Asia, the bustling transit port of Singapore, the remote islands and ports of the Dutch East Indies. It was from Singapore that he made four voyages as first mate on the steamship Vidar to a small trading post which was forty miles up a river on the east coast of…
Read More New Book Announcement: “Joseph Conrad’s ‘Eastern Voyages’: Tales of Singapore and an East Borneo River” by Ian Burnet
Fiction Reviews
“Fragile Monsters” by Catherine Menon
2 April 20217 April 2021
Catherine Menon’s debut novel, Fragile Monsters, is a beautifully written story of one Indian Malaysian family’s history, entwined with secrets and hidden heartbreak, told through the fractious relationship of Durga and her Ammuma, her grandmother Mary. When Durga, a mathematics lecturer returns home to rural Pahang after ten years away in Canada and in Kuala…
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Fiction Reviews
“The Java Enigma” by Erni Salleh
12 March 202115 March 2021
To some extent, all one needs to know about The Java Enigma is that it has been called, more than once, “Da Vinci Code”-like. This will either intrigue or repel, depending on how one feels about Dan Brown’s genre-creating blockbuster. Neither reaction would however be entirely warranted, for—while there are certainly similarities—Erni Salleh’s debut novel…
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Fiction Reviews
“The Company Daughters” by Samantha Rajaram
13 December 202013 December 2020
White women were a rare commodity in Europe’s Asian colonies, a considerable problem if one wanted to build a long-term colonial society while avoiding miscegenation. It was a matter that particularly exercised the first leaders of the Dutch East Indies.
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Fiction Reviews
“The Fisherman King” by Kathrina Mohd Daud
10 December 2020
Lisan, a humble fisherman, mysteriously disappears for eight years before returning home. Bhatia, the wife he has left behind, has remarried in the meantime, but there’s more, and something irrepressible for him to reclaim besides her. Lisan has a royal destiny to be fulfilled.
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Non-Fiction Reviews
“Cina Timor: Baba, Hakka, and Cantonese in the Making of Timor-Leste” by Douglas Kammen and Jonathan Chen
30 November 202030 November 2020
Timor-Leste has been just about the most geographically and politically remote corner of East Asia, a distant second to Macau in Portugal’s one-time East Asian possessions, diminutive compared to the Dutch East Indies and later Indonesia. And the Chinese community there, as far as the Chinese diaspora goes, one of the less substantial. Perhaps for…
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Non-Fiction Reviews
“Man of Contradictions: Joko Widodo and the Struggle to Remake Indonesia” by Ben Bland
16 October 202016 October 2020
In Ben Bland’s political biography Man of Contradictions: Joko Widodo and the Struggle to Remake Indonesia, the current president of Indonesia starts out as a political outsider but becomes part of the establishment.
Read More “Man of Contradictions: Joko Widodo and the Struggle to Remake Indonesia” by Ben Bland
Fiction Reviews
“The Man Who Collected Women” by Nigel Barley
10 October 202015 March 2021
A novel based on anthropologist and author Nigel Barley’s writing career might well be called The Man Who Collected Colorful European Characters from the History of Southeast Asia.
Read More “The Man Who Collected Women” by Nigel Barley
Non-Fiction Reviews
“In the Dragon’s Shadow, Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century” by Sebastian Strangio
7 October 20207 October 2020
For the countries of Southeast Asia, geographical proximity to China is a blessing and a curse. In the Dragon’s Shadow, Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century, by Sebastian Strangio, manages to sketch the history these nations have with China and detail the current geopolitical situation in an engaging fashion. While the book is prefaced with…
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Fiction Reviews
“A Good True Thai” by Sunisa Manning
6 October 20206 October 2020
With the exception of Singapore and Malaysia, where English is relatively widely used, and with the further exception of so-called “expat fiction” featuring foreign protagonists, Southeast Asia seemingly generates fewer novels in English—whether in translation or written directly in the language—than other regions of South and East Asia. This situation has ameliorated somewhat in recent…
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Fiction Reviews
“The Glass Kingdom” by Lawrence Osborne
30 August 202015 March 2021
American Sarah Mullins, an erstwhile mousy brunette turned blue-eyed blonde, has just pulled off an obscure literary fraud, netting a suitcase of cash and needing a place to hide out, which is why Lawrence Osborne’s most recent novel opens in a luxury apartment in an upscale residential tower block in Bangkok known as “The Kingdom”.
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Fiction Reviews
“How the Man in Green Saved Pahang, and Possibly the World” by Joshua Kam
12 August 202011 December 2020
Well, what can one say? The guy can write. Joshua Kam’s How the Man in Green Saved Pahang, and Possibly the World is quite the debut, accomplished, deft, unabashed and exuberant.
Read More “How the Man in Green Saved Pahang, and Possibly the World” by Joshua Kam
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New Book Announcement: “Painter and Patron: The Maritime Silk Road in the Códice Casanatense” by Peter Gordon and Juan José Morales
3 August 202026 August 2020
Just around the corner from Rome’s Pantheon, on the Via di Sant’Ignazio, is the famed Biblioteca Casanatense. Among its precious books and manuscripts is an album of 76 striking watercolours made in Goa around 1540, the work of an anonymous Indian painter for an unknown Portuguese patron.
Read More New Book Announcement: “Painter and Patron: The Maritime Silk Road in the Códice Casanatense” by Peter Gordon and Juan José Morales

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