英文

　　Modern Singapore was forged in the flames of a volatile past. Different groups fought to tear Singapore apart during our early years of nation building.

　　This five-book series traces those turbulent years and tell the stories of the people who witnessed history up close. Written in a clear and down-to-earth way, packed with photographs and with pages of graphic novel storytelling, these booklets will appeal to students, young people and anyone looking for a vivid and concise overview of Singapore’s turbulent years.

The five titles in the series are:

• Battle for Hearts and Minds: Fighting the Communist Threat, 1948-1963 The fight against the communist threat in Singapore and Malaya in the years immediately after World War II. (76 pages)
  
  
• The Undeclared War: Konfrontasi Indonesia’s Konfrontasi (Confrontation) campaign against Malaysia and Singapore in the 1960s, including the 1965 bombing of MacDonald House in Orchard Road that killed three innocent people. (64 pages)
  
  
• Into The Fire: 1964 Racial Riots The deadly racial riots of July and September 1964 that took place against a backdrop of growing political tension in Singapore and Malaysia. (52 pages)
  
  
• Singapore Is Out: Separation and Independence The fight for merger and the issues that led to political tension between Singapore and Malaysia and, eventually, to independence for Singapore. (48 pages)
  
  
• War Is Far From Over: Fighting the Communist Threat, 1968-1989 The havoc wreaked when the communists resumed their attacks in Malaysia and Singapore in the 1960s and 1970s. (60 pages)

　　After Japan was hit by a triple disaster — an earthquake, a tsunami, and a nuclear meltdown — in 2011, Singapore raised about S$35.7 million, one of its largest contributions for disaster relief in another country.

　　In 2023, the year after Japan had relaxed border measures implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic that erupted in 2020, 591,267 travellers from Singapore visited Japan. This was equivalent to almost 15 per cent of Singapore’s resident population. In 2024, this number grew further by 16.9 per cent to 691,100.

　　The people of Singapore have shown strong support for Japan, even though Japan had occupied their home from 1942 to 1945, during the Second World War.

　　Things improved later. After Singapore became independent in 1965, Japan established diplomatic relations with it in 1966 and contributed significantly to its development. Both countries have also since cooperated in various areas, including the economic, defence, and security spheres.

　　The Land of the Rising Sun and the Lion City: The Story of Japan and Singapore illustrates the growing ties between both countries through their people’s experiences. The collection of 68 essays is contributed by more than 80 writers from various walks of life, including government officials, entrepreneurs, artists, academics, and journalists.

　　They include Singapore’s Permanent Secretary for Home Affairs Pang Kin Keong and Japan’s former Special Advisor on National Security Miyagawa Makio, who led the negotiations for the 2002 Japan–Singapore Economic Partnership Agreement; former Permanent Secretary for Foreign Affairs Tan Chin Tiong and Bilahari Kausikan; Nippon Paint Chairman Goh Hup Jin; Albirex Niigata President Korenaga Daisuke; TungLok Group President Andrew Tjioe; chef Willin Low; Enshu Sado School’s Grand Master Kobori Sojitsu; World Toilet Organization founder Jack Sim; Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO) Singapore Office’s Executive Director Shiraishi Takuya; Gardens by the Bay Chief Executive Felix Loh; Japan Creative Centre Director Kawabe Akiko; Singapore Film Society Chairman Kenneth Tan; Artistic Director of the Singapore Biennale 2006 and 2008, Nanjo Fumio; National Gallery Singapore’s Assistant Chief Executive Aun Koh; Cultural Medallion winners Iskandar Jalil, Dick Lee, and Eric Khoo; YouTuber Ghib Ojisan; and journalists Walter Sim and Michiyo Ishida. Singapore’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Vivian Balakrishnan and Japan’s former Minister for Digital Transformation Kono Taro penned the forewords.

"The poems in Patient History navigate a mother's illness through lush imagery and aquarium mind. The poems are also unafraid to refract illness and memory through different forms... in Patient History, the cataloguing of beautiful images acts as question marks to an uncertain mind, and the uncertainty amidst illness." —Victoria Chang, author of The Trees Witness Everything; Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief; and Obit

“Patient history” is a medical term describing the method by which doctors gather information about a patient’s past and present conditions. Yet, how much of a patient’s history do doctors really know, and how much agency do we have in determining our own histories?

Patient History is a whimsical exploration of the typically grim world of sickness and death. Woven from pop culture, fairytales, and East-meets-West childhood memories of growing up in Singapore, these fantasies are cotton candy sweet—osteoporosis becomes Singapore’s signature Chili Crab, a fistula transfigures into fairy, and organs are commemorated as a theme park.

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.

What if you could dream up any building you like? What would it be? How would constructing it change our lives?

A shopping mall self-destructs, and a single mother vanishes. A tree house for orphans and old folks is torn apart by an act of mercy. The Singapore Flyer is reinvented as a political prison. In this collection of nine tales, Clara Chow examines an alternative Singaporean landscape—one that exists only on paper—and the people we might be in it. A former newspaper correspondent, she interviews nine architects about chimeric structures and sets short stories in them. A hybrid of journalism and fiction, Dream Storeys documents the voices of urban visionaries, while taking their ideas into inventive, evocative new territories.

Architects featured
Yen Yen Wu • Chang Jiat-Hwee • Nirmal Kishnani • Lai Chee Kien • Michael Leong • Mark Wee • Olivia Tang • Joshua Comaroff • Tan Kok Hiang

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.

Endangered tigers connecting telepathically through time-travel; a guard’s ethical dilemma at a history museum; a slaughterhouse worker’s memories of his dead wife; a monochrome town upended by a wild watermelon…

In This Desert, There Were Seeds is an intimate collection of past and future dreams, featuring exciting new and established literary voices from Western Australia and Singapore. From our shifting sense of community and identity, to our frustrations with existing political, social and economic structures—this anthology transcends boundaries and captures the persistence of ordinary lives in deserts literal and metaphorical.

From a future of electronic doas and AI psychotherapists, sense-activated communion with forests and a portal to realms undersea, to a reimagined origin and afterlife—editor and translator Nazry Bahrawi brings together an exciting selection of never-before translated and new Malay spec-fic stories by established and emerging writers from Singapore. 

Especially in an anglophone-dominated genre, very little of Malay speculative fiction from Singapore is known to readers here and beyond. Yet contemporary Bahasa literature here is steeped in spec-fic writing that can account as a literary movement (aliran)—and unmistakably draws from the minority Malay experience in a city obsessed with progress.

Nine Yard Sarees is a multigenerational portrait of a fictional Tamil Brahmin family. Comprising eleven interlinked stories, this short story cycle traces the lives of nine women from 1950 all the way to 2019, shedding light on the community and its evolution through the decades. As the stories take us from India to Singapore, Australia and even America, we follow the experiences of the women in the family: Raji the matriarch who lives in seclusion at an ashram; her daughter Padma who struggles to raise her family the traditional way; Padma’s daughter Keerthana who is about to be married and don the nine yard saree, a symbol of womanhood. Tender, dynamic and full of heart, this cycle is a resonant portrayal of female solidarity and the complexities of the diasporic experience in contemporary Singapore.

“There is so much to appreciate in Prasanthi Ram’s debut collection, Nine Yard Sarees. As a portrait of a family, these stories connect to form a layered narrative about women, migration and identity. As a work of diaspora fiction about the Tamil-Brahmin community in Singapore, these connecting stories comment on questions of belonging and the pertinent tension between tradition and modernity. Ram writes with precision and clarity about this family while also treating the characters with the warmth and compassion that they deserve. Shifting narrative perspectives and covering a wide landscape of time and geographic space, Nine Yard Sarees confronts diaspora in all its complexity. A thoroughly enjoyable and meaningful work of fiction about family, community and the reverberations of migration and displacement.”
—Balli Kaur Jaswal, Author of Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows

“The madisar, the eponymous nine-yard saree, weaves these stories together beautifully and artfully, these stories about Tamil Brahmin women living mostly in Singapore, but also living, in Prasanthi Ram’s deft, sensitive and humorous telling, in full, human complexity in their loves and hates, joys and sorrows, envies and regrets. Nine Yard Sarees is an uncommonly rich and precise debut, closely observed, magically empathetic and formally ambitious. If you love the stories of Jhumpa Lahiri and Alice Munro, you will love these stories.”
—Jee Leong Koh, Winner of the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize in English fiction

"A gripping, masterfully crafted work that is both haunting and comforting. I read it in one night."
—Akshita Nanda, co-winner of the 2020 Singapore Literature Prize in English Fiction

The following stories contain some references to sensitive topics which may warrant content notices:

Rakshasa—casteist rhetoric; fat phobic language
Agni’s Trials—sexual harrassment
The Perfect Shot—sexual assault
Nine Yard Sarees—racism; fat phobic language
Loose Threads—self-harm; pregnancy loss
In Her Graveyard, She Bloomed—homophobic language; pregnancy loss
Before the Rooster Calls—domestic abuse

While the content of these stories 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 stories, do put the book down and talk to someone about how you feel.

Sequel to Josephine Chia’s 2014 Singapore Literature prize-winning book, Kampong Spirit - Gotong Royong: Life in Potong Pasir, 1955 to 1965.

Kampong life in Singapore did not end in 1965 with her independence.

In Josephine Chia’s new collection of non-fiction stories, the phasing out of attap-thatched villages, the largest mass movement in Singapore, is set against the backdrop of significant national events.

Weaving personal tribulations—her teenage angst—and the experiences of villagers from her kampong, Josephine skilfully parallels the hopes and challenges of a toddling nation going through the throes of industrialisation and rapid changes from 1966 to 1975.

These delightful, real-life stories, sprinkled with snippets of her Peranakan culture, reveal the joie-de-vivre of gotong royong or community spirit, despite impoverished conditions, in the last days of kampong life.

Why did independent Singapore celebrate two hundred years of its founding as a British colony in 2019? What does Merdeka mean for Singaporeans? And what are the possibilities of doing decolonial history in Singapore? Raffles Renounced: Towards a Merdeka History presents essays by historians, literary scholars and artists which grapple with these questions. The volume also reproduces some of the source material used in the play Merdeka / 獨立 / சுதந்திரம் (Wild Rice, 2019). Taken together, the book shows how the contradictions of independent nationhood haunt Singaporeans' collective and personal stories about Merdeka. It points to the need for a Merdeka history: an open and fearless culture of historical reckoning that not only untangles us from colonial narratives, but proposes emancipatory possibilities.