時代精神書屋

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.

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.

Winner of the PEN Translates award

From 1976 to 1989, Hai Fan was part of the guerrilla forces of the Malayan Communist Party. These short stories are inspired by his experiences during his thirteen years in the rainforest.

Struggling through an arduous trek, two comrades pine for each other but don't know how to declare their love; a woman who has annoyed all her comrades finally wins their approval when she finds a mythical mousedeer; improvising around the lack of ingredients, a perpetually hungry guerrilla makes delicious cakes from cassava and elephant fat. The rainforest may be a dangerous place where death awaits, but so do love, desire and hope.

Delicious Hunger is a book about the moments in and between warfare, when hunger is so palpable it can be tasted, and the natural world becomes an extension of the body. Deftly translated by Jeremy Tiang, Hai Fan's stories are about a group of people who chose to fight for a better world and, in the process, built their own.

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.

Winner of Best Fiction Title for Singapore Book Awards (2016)
Winner of the Singapore Literature Prize for Fiction (2014)
Selected by The Business Times as a Top 10 Singapore book from (1965–2015)
Shortlisted for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s Internationaler Literaturpreis
Shortlisted for the Frankfurt Book Fair’s LiBeraturpreis
Longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award (2014)

Meet an over-the-hill pop yé-yé singer with a faulty heart; two conservative middle- aged women holding hands in the Galápagos, and the proprietor of a Laundromat with a penchant for Cantonese songs of heartbreak. Find out the truth about racial riot fodder-girl Maria Hertogh, now living out her days as a chambermaid in Lake Tahoe; a mirage of the Merlion as a ladyboy working Orchard Towers; and a high- stakes fantasy starring the still-suave lead of the 1990s TV hit serial, The Unbeatables.

Ministry of Moral Panic is an extraordinary collection and the introduction of a revelatory new voice. Heartfelt and sexy, the stories of Amanda Lee Koe encompass a skewed world fraught with prestige anxiety, moral relativism, sexual frankness, and the improbable necessity of human connection. Told in strikingly original prose, these are stories that plough the possibilities of understanding Singapore and her denizens.

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.

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.

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

G*D IS A WOMAN

In Singapore, there is only one rule: be careful who you troll. Frustrated by the rigid, unforgiving system in which they try to make art, a bunch of irate artists start a fake petition to cancel Ariana Grande. Things get wildly out of hand when some Singaporeans take the petition so seriously that Ari’s upcoming concert comes under threat. 

In a whirlwind of competing petitions, frantic Zoom calls between Los Angeles and Singapore, and whispered conversations at the golf course, the campaign to save the concert comes up against the most powerful people in Singapore: the easily offended. 

From acclaimed playwright Joel Tan (Tartuffe: The Imposter, The Butterfly Lovers) comes G*d Is A Woman – a scathing satire on censorship, complaint culture, and the ridiculous outbursts of moral outrage that frequently reverberate across the Singaporean internet. Directed with gleeful irreverence by Ivan Heng, this audaciously funny new play will make you laugh until it hurts.

TARTUFFE: THE IMPOSTER

A wealthy family starts to unravel when the head of the household, Orgon, befriends Tartuffe — a charming, seductive con artist masquerading as a man of faith. Everyone else smells a rat, even as Tartuffe weasels his way into Orgon’s home, heart and bank account. What will it take for Orgon to finally see the light? Can unholy disaster be averted? Or will blind devotion win the day?

In celebration of the 400th anniversary of Molière’s birth, Wild Rice’s Tartuffe: The Imposter remains trenchantly relevant today, in a world populated by scam artists and false prophets. With an incisive new script by Joel Tan and direction by Glen Goei, this is a classic satire on religious hypocrisy and a warning about the calamity that can follow when we turn a blind eye to the dark deeds of the “pious”. Desperately trying to untangle vice from virtue is a stellar ensemble cast led by Ivan Heng and Benjamin Chow.

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.

We Saw Mountains gathers nine stories of human and non-human daring, where quotidian life is cracked open to possibilities of autonomy and re-imagination. A teen’s part-time job tests his integrity, a grieving elephant finds a new home by way of a contested river, and on an island a mountain appears, fully formed.

Through these visionary tales, Diana Rahim—whose stories have been featured in Best New Singaporean Short Stories and The Best of World SF—asks, can we do things differently? Can we imagine a different kind of life?

Step into this spellbinding collection and witness transformations both cosmic and everyday. Journey from the desert to the oasis, from drought to bloom, and return to our world with a rekindled faith in the possibility of becoming.