英文

There are obscure emotions that reside in every one of us, where language cannot reach, because its waters are too deep. A lot was going on in 1979. Most Malay villages were long gone or in their dying days. Malay rock began its unstoppable rise with the emergence of its first influential rock band, while drugs were just across the street. And on one Friday night that year, during the final months in the life of the once major Malay village of Engku Aman in Geylang Serai, 15-year-old Alia left her house and vanished without a trace. In the aftermath of her disappearance, the protective layers in the lives of three other young people who knew her begin unpeeling as they struggle to make sense of her disappearance and their lives in a period of immense social and cultural change.

A poignant coming-of-age historical novel that captures what it might have felt like to live in Engku Aman, for which there is little formal historical accounting. While there are many historical novels in Sing Lit that centre the Chinese Singaporean experience,  Neverness  centres the Malay experience and immerses readers in the heyday of Malay rock. Suitable for both young adults and adults.

A glittering, bold, darkly funny novel about two sisters—one in New York, one in Singapore—who are bound by an ancient secret.

Sisterhood is difficult for Su and Emerald. Su leads a sheltered, moneyed life as the picture-perfect wife of a conservative politician in Singapore. Emerald is a nihilistic sugar baby in New York, living from whim to whim and using her charms to make ends meet. But they share a secret: once, they were snakes, basking under a full moon in Tang dynasty China.

A thousand years later, their mysterious history is the only thing still binding them together. When Emerald experiences a violent encounter in Central Park and Su boards the next flight to New York, the two reach a tenuous reconciliation for the first time in decades. Su convinces Emerald to move to Singapore so she can keep an eye on her—but she soon begins to worry that Emerald’s irrepressible behaviour will out them both, in a sparkling, affluent city where everything runs like clockwork and any deviation from the norm is automatically suspect.

Razor-sharp, hilarious, and raw in emotion, Sister Snake, a reimagining of The Legend of the White Snake, is a novel about being seen for who you are—and, ultimately, how to live free.

“Amanda Lee Koe’s tale of serpentine sisterhood will wend its way into your heart. Drawing equally from folklore and current events, this fearless novel entertains and delights. Beneath its beguiling surface, Sister Snake explores fundamental questions: Are our destinies determined by our bodies? What forms can family take? And what, in the end, does it mean to be human?”
—Rajesh Parameswaran, author of I Am An Executioner

Shezlez the Self-Proclaimed is an absurdist story about a poor man’s ambition to organise his own political party in an unnamed country characterised by moral apathy, poverty and heartless bureaucracy. Upon his first speech, so rousing as to attract the attention of the Progressive Party, Shezlez finds himself embroiled in a corrupt scheme of deceit and backstabbing in the leadup to the upcoming mayoral elections. A Machiavellian tale of political ambition, Shezlez the Self-Proclaimed examines the fickleness of loyalty, and interrogates the perennial question of whether the pursuit of power, no matter how idealistic its genesis, can ever remain a noble quest.

Police sergeant Hafiz lies in a coma after a gunshot to the head. The investigation by Internal Affairs uncovered a game of Russian roulette gone wrong, and the case is now closed. But there are rumbles of concern in the Ministry, and middle-aged civil servant Boon Teck—assisted by young colleague Nithya—is dispatched to take another look.

Suffused with mystery and intrigue, After the Inquiry steps into the mirror maze of Singapore’s bureaucracy, where silvered surfaces hide troubling secrets, and those who search for the truth risk getting lost…

“Exceptional... an unsettling insight into bureaucratic cruelty, and the best thing I've read from Singapore for years and years.”
—Peter Guest, Acting Business Editor, WIRED

Winner, Book of the Year & Best Literary Work, Singapore Book Awards 2024

Ram has been ignored and dismissed his entire life. His parents patronise him, his older brother belittles him, his class pretends he doesn’t exist, and he is certain he will fail his impending A-Levels. The only good part of his life is Kass, a fellow outsider he has known since childhood. But when the bruises on Kass from her abusive father get worse and worse, Ram decides to don a mask and frighten him into changing his ways. After his scare tactic goes fatally wrong, the mask he wore calls out to him again to clean the city's filth.

Neo-noir thriller meets coming-of-age mystery, catskull explores the violence inherent in an unforgiving city and what it does to the people who inhabit it. It complicates questions of what is right, what is lawful, and who pays the price in the quest for justice.

"Myle Yan Tay’s debut novel is a sharp, dark look at the education system as a potential site of violence and harm. This is writing that doesn’t flinch and dares the reader to sit with and in discomfort while excavating deeply existential questions about what defines who we are as a society and the individuals who build (or break) it."
—Pooja Nansi, Author of We Make Spaces Divine

This book contains references to topics such as physical violence, racially insensitive language, discrimination and abuse of migrant workers, and themes of sexual assault, sexual abuse and paedophilia. While the content of this novel is fictional, these topics reflect real issues.

We recognise that the ways in which readers might respond to and deal with these issues may vary, as our relationships to these topics are unique. If you find yourself feeling overwhelmed or not in the right headspace to experience the story, do put the book down and talk to someone about how you feel, or consult resources printed at the back of the book.

When 7-year-old Anna told a lie to get out of trouble, she didn’t expect her older sister to go missing. Faced with her mother’s wrath and riddled with guilt, Anna tries to make amends as she grapples with the aftermath of her actions.

Until her daughter’s body is found, Su Lai refuses to believe that she has simply disappeared. Turning to a medium as her obsession to find her daughter escalates, the family is sucked into a web of pain and deceit that forces them to confront their own measures of loss. A masterful debut by Jinny Koh, The Gods Will Hear Us Eventually boldly interrogates the extent of familial love and expectation while unravelling the complexities of hope and redemption.

Hailed as “the definitive Singaporean novel”, this new edition of Heartland is accompanied by a new preface by author Daren Shiau and a publisher’s foreword that contextualises the novel’s imprint on the Singapore literary landscape since its first publication in 1999.

An iconic work, Heartland explores the paradox of rootedness and rootlessness in fast-changing Singapore. Set in the early 1990s, the novel follows the years of Wing Seng as he leaves school and is conscripted into full-time National Service. As Wing tries to reconcile his past with his future amid transitions through different phases of life, he finds meaning in his intense attachment to his surrounding landscape. Yet, as relationships and the years slip by, Wing is forced to question his own certainties and the wisdom of the people he values.

Set in Singapore’s heartland at the turn of the century, Heartland’s capturing of the texture of everyday life provides the backdrop essential to the bildungsroman’s exploration of identity, belonging and connection in an increasingly urbanised Singapore.

Longlisted for the 2013 Frank O'connor International Short Story Award

Malay Sketches is a collection of stories that borrows its name from a book of anecdotes by colonial governor Frank Swettenham, describing Malay life on the Peninsula. In Alfian Sa’at’s hands, these sketches are reimagined as flash fictions that record the lives of members of the Malay community in Singapore. With precise and incisive prose, Malay Sketches offers the reader profound insights into the realities of life as an ethnic minority.

Corridor is a collection of short stories all set in present-day Singapore. With unsentimental clarity and heartbreaking honesty, Alfian Sa’at writes about HDB dwellers – students, housewives and factory workers, whose lives begin to unravel once they discover that happiness is a fragile thing in a country obsessed with progress and success.

The characters in each story find themselves in situations that offer them a ticket to hope and change: A video camera transforms the way a resentful daughter sees her widowed mother. A married couple receives free holiday tickets just when their luck seems to have run out. A girl encounters a transvestite on an MRT train ride who tells her that she looks like a famous singer. And a man enters a discotheque after a bitter divorce and re-learns the terror of falling in love all over again.

Rich in authentic detail, with a sensitive ear for the vernacular, Corridor paints an elegiac, revealing portrait of contemporary Singaporeans who exist along the city’s corridors – haunted by lost loves, irrevocable childhoods and a deep longing to be free.

Corridor won the Singapore Literature Prize Commendation Award in 1998.