時代精神書屋

Mummy, why do you always have to leave for 17A…

17A Keong Saik Road recounts Charmaine Leung’s growing-up years on Keong Saik Road in the 1970s when it was a prominent red-light precinct in Chinatown in Singapore. An interweaving of past and present narratives, 17A Keong Saik Road tells of her mother’s journey as a young child put up for sale to becoming the madame of a brothel in Keong Saik. Unfolding her story as the daughter of a brothel operator and witnessing these changes to her family, Charmaine traces the transformation of the Keong Saik area from the 1930s to the present, and through writing, finds reconciliation.

A beautiful dedication to the past, to memory, and to the people who have gone before us, 17A Keong Saik Road tells the rich stories of the Ma Je, the Pei Pa Zai, and the Dai Gu Liong—marginalised, forgotten women of the past, who despite their difficulties, persevered in working towards the hope of a better future.

Disability is neither strange nor distant. Part autobiography, part reflections of social advocate Cassandra Chiu’s experiences as a person living with visual impairment, A Place For Us is the story of the first woman to be a guide dog handler in Singapore and the first Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum in Southeast Asia who happens to be blind.

Cassandra’s story starts with her growing-up years in 1980s Singapore, chronicling how her life unfolds with the onset of Stargardt disease, which causes progressive vision loss. From pursuing an education, navigating motherhood, to building a career as a psychotherapist, Cassandra openly discusses the attitudes towards disability and her journey towards true independence with her guide dog Esme.

In inimitable frankness, A Place For Us offers an illuminating perspective of a person living with disability beyond the pity party of her life, and advocates for a more equal and sustainable future for people with disabilities.

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

Brown is Redacted: Reflecting on Race in Singapore responds to, expands on and questions what we think we know about the lived experiences of minority-raced people in Singapore. Inspired by Brown Is Haram, a performance-lecture on minority-race narratives staged at The Substation in 2021, this anthology reflects on how brownness is constructed, sidelined, but also celebrated in this nation-state. Through a combination of essays, academic works, poems, and stories by brown individuals, Brown is Redacted both attempts to and fails to create a singular brown experience. What this anthology does produce instead, is a moving and expressive work of solidarity and vulnerability.

"Brown is Redacted is an incredible and much-needed collection of work that challenges preconceived notions about state- and socially created categories. The works here interrogate the nature of identity, using the lenses of art, academia and personal experience and capturing the dreary pain of being othered as well as the powerful joy of being seen. The writers hold nothing back, offering their hurt, tenderly showcasing the beauty in the under-represented, and triumphantly celebrating individuality." —Akshita Nanda, co-winner of the Singapore Literature Prize in English Fiction

“Brown is Redacted, through its ambition and lyricism, liberates us from the multicultural straitjacket stitched in the 1960s. On every page is a voice that has risen from the interstices of overlapping traditions and generations. Together they lay bare the complexities of the brown experience: the rawness of the struggle, the absurdity of the ignorance, the radical agency of choice, the ecstasy of solidarity. We can transcend. To be brown in Singapore is to dance between anguish and joy.” —Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh, Editor-in-Chief, Jom

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.

“One of Singapore’s most visible poets, Pang grows with each book. In his poems we hear a voice unhurried, confident, and capable of carrying diverse humors, and read a rhetoric shaded to ironies, surprising us with glimpses of contemporary experience that affirm yet mock, celebrate and unsettle. His poetry adds a rich and complex presence to the critical mass of urban literature now fully emergent from Singapore. His poems, at once recognizably national and international in reach, offer a fresh edgy energy to this tradition.”

- Professor Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, 1992 and author of Joss and Gold

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.

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

In this era of climate crisis, in which our very futures are at stake, sustainability is a global imperative. Yet we tend to associate sustainability, nature, and the environment with distant places, science, and policy. The truth is that everything is environmental, from transportation to taxes, work to love, cities to cuisine.

This book is the first to examine contemporary Singapore from an ecocultural lens, looking at the ways that Singaporean life and culture is deeply entangled with the nonhuman lives that flourish all around us. The authors represent a new generation of cultural critics and environmental thinkers, who will inherit the future we are creating today. From chilli crab to Tiger Beer, Changi Airport to Pulau Semakau, O-levels to orang minyak films, these essays offer fresh perspectives on familiar subjects, prompting us to recognise the incredible urgency of climate change and the need to transform our ways of thinking, acting, learning, living, and governing so as to maintain a stable planet and a decent future.

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.

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.

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.

 “I have had nothing bad happen to me except my own doing. I have let this cowardice envelop me, and I can’t shake it off. I will commit the worst thing you can ever do to someone who loves you: killing yourself. The scary thing is, I’m okay with that.” —Victoria McLeod, Singapore, March 30, 2014

Loss Adjustment is a mother’s recount of her 17-year-old daughter’s suicide.

In the wake of Victoria McLeod’s passing, she left behind a remarkable journal in her laptop of the final four months of her life. Linda Collins, her mother, has woven these into her memoir, which is at once cohesive, yet fragmented, reflecting a survivor's state of mind after devastating loss.

Loss Adjustment involves the endless whys, the journey of Linda Collins and her husband in honouring Victoria, and the impossible question of what drove their daughter to this irretrievable act. A stunningly intimate portrait of loss and grief, Loss Adjustment is a breaking of silence—a book whose face society cannot turn away from.

Making Kin: Ecofeminist Essays from Singapore contemplates and re-centres Singapore women in the overlapping discourses of family, home, ecology and nation. For the first time, this collection of ecofeminist essays focuses on the crafts, minds, bodies and subjectivities of a diverse group of women making kin with the human and non-human world as they navigate their lives.

From ruminations on caregiving, to surreal interspecies encounters, to indigenous ways of knowing, these women writers chart a new path on the map of Singapore’s literary scene, writing urgently about gender, nature, climate change, reciprocity and other critical environmental issues.

In a climate-changed world where vital connections are lost, Making Kin is an essential collection that blurs boundaries between the personal and the political. It is a revolutionary approach towards intersectional environmentalism.

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.

About the Author

Dina Zaman is a Kuala Lumpur-based writer and researcher. She is the co-founder of IMAN Research, a think tank focusing on socio-political and security matters, and a founding member of the Southeast Asian Women Peacebuilders. She has written extensively for the Malaysian media and is a contributor to The Jakarta Post. Her latest passion projects revolve around Terengganu Royal History. Dina is the author of three non-fiction titles – I am Muslim (Silverfish Publishing), Holy Men, Holy Women (SIRD) and Malayland(Ethos/Faction) – and King of the Sea (Clarity Publishing) her collection of short stories.

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.

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.

Disability is all around us—among people we meet, the media, sports, our own family and friends. Undeniably, all of us have or will one day come to experience or encounter disability. But how can we reckon with the realities of those who live with disability, or its reality in our own lives? In a city-state slowly moving towards inclusion, how do those meant to be 'included' feel about such efforts? Not Without Us: perspectives on disability and inclusion in Singapore is a groundbreaking collection of essays that takes a creative and critical disability studies approach to centre disability, and rethink the ways in which we research, analyse, think and know about disability in our lives. Across multiple domains and perspectives, the writings in this volume consider what it means to live with disability in a purportedly inclusive and accessible Singapore.

(Book cover description: The central visual of the cover is a photo. This photo, taken by photographer Isabelle Lim, is of two performers in the centre of a spacious room, where the wall and floor are both decorated with brown and gold patterns. The foreground is lit by a bright yet warm light, which illuminates the side profiles of the two men against the blackness behind them. Closer to the camera is the rapper Wheelsmith. Clad in a mustard  yellow cap and blue denim jacket, he is riding his wheelchair toward the left of the picture. At a slight distance behind him, and in the midst of walking in the opposite direction, is fellow rapper ShiGGa Shay, sporting an orange, white, and blue puffer jacket and a bun of electric blue hair."

On the book cover, this photo is accompanied by the Book title "Not Without Us" in all-capitals, beige text against the black background on the top of the photo. The subtitle in small caps "perspectives on disability and inclusion in Singapore" is printed in the center-right of the book cover. In the black background of the photo are light blue lines in the shape of Wheelsmith's and Shigga Shay's silhouettes, layered and expanding towards the top of the book cover to amplify their poses in the photo. The editors' byline is at the bottom of the book cover in black text.)

“This is a pathbreaking book. Not Without Us weaves together a rich fabric of voices exploring the politics and poetics of disability in Singapore. Moving between lived reality, representation and struggles for social transformation, the collection excavates hidden or forgotten pasts, documents struggles and community formation in the present, and hints at possible futures. The essay collection challenges contemporary discourses of and scholarship on disability in Singapore by centring disabled subjectivities. In the process, it opens up new spaces of empathy, praxis and critique.” —Philip Holden, Independent Scholar and Counsellor 

"It warms my heart to see another book on disability through the Asian lens. Not just any book or author, but a plethora of contributors who are leaders in the Singaporean disability scene. The tapestry of all the essays inspires the imagination to how we can truly create a place that all of us can call home. Inclusion isn’t just keeping the token seat available, or inviting someone disabled to the party, but truly paving the way forward for all of us to celebrate each other as individuals in all our different shapes, sizes and colours. Thank you Not Without Us for so eloquently celebrating ‘Nothing about us, without us’!" —Cassandra Chiu, Psychotherapist; Social Advocate and Author of A Place For Us

"Not Without Us is a richly edited and profoundly written collection of essays about disability in Singapore. It is part of a new and fresh movement to provide local knowledges and global perspectives to a field that has been for too long grounded in the West, particularly the US and the UK. The book will be extremely valuable not only to readers in Singapore but also to those throughout the world who seek a broader perspective on significant issues in disability studies, arts, policy and activism." —Lennard J. Davis, Distinguished Professor, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Illinois in Chicago

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Singapore is small, a complex country full of contradictions, inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies. Often held up as a model nation, we sometimes forget that Singapore is seen differently by different people. With a decade of activism and journalism experience, Kirsten Han reveals various aspects of her home country that don’t follow what many of us know as the conventional ‘Singapore Story’. The Singapore I Recognise is Kirsten’s reckoning with civil society’s experiences of Singapore, perspectives that are often unheard, or fall through the cracks. Through researched interviews and heartfelt reflections, Kirsten tells us how parts of Singapore are already moving towards communal care, solidarity, empowerment and hope. This is a resonant portrayal of home in the island city-state.

“If you live in Singapore, you know it is a place with more layers and complexities than meets the eye. Yet, it is not always possible to grasp what lies beneath the glossy stories of economic success, social harmony, and political stability. Kirsten Han’s book—part reflexive memoir, part incisive reporting—is an informative, nuanced, and deeply humane series of essays that helps us better understand and appreciate the contradictions, tensions, and power plays that are integral to the Singapore story. Read it to learn new things, read it to feel big emotions, read it to expand your thinking on the realities and possibilities of home.”
—Teo You Yenn, sociologist and author of This is What Inequality Looks Like

“When Kirsten Han sees something, she says something, especially when that something is an injustice that afflicts the weak in Singapore’s extremely privileged society. This book encapsulates the values she has fearlessly espoused for years, and for which she continues to pay a personal price. Unable to counter her arguments on the merits, the establishment has subjected her to smears and harassment. One day, her conscientious contributions will be lauded. Until then, Kirsten Han is the eye that too few in Singapore recognise. The country is blinder for it.”
—Cherian George, Author of Air-Conditioned Nation Revisited

This book contains descriptions of physical violence, mentions of incarceration and themes related to the death penalty, as well as references to arrests and interrogation. 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, personally affected or unable to engage with this content at present, feel free to put this book down and talk to someone about how you feel, or consult the resources printed at the back.

Can a life weave along through the same notes and yet come to play forth different sounds?

The Sound of SCH (pronounced S-C-H) is the true story of a journey with mental illness, beautifully told by Danielle Lim from a time when she grew up witnessing her uncle's untold struggle with a crippling mental and social disease, and her mother's difficult role as caregiver. The story takes place between 1961 and 1994, backdropped by a fast-globalising Singapore where stigmatisation of persons afflicted with mental illness nevertheless remains deep-seated. Unflinchingly raw and honest in its portrayal of living with schizophrenia, The Sound of Sch is a moving account of human resiliency and sacrifice in the face of brokenness.