“A woman had been crushed by a goat that fell from the sky.”
Thus begins Malaysian writer Amy Leow’s debut novel, The Scarlet Throne, one of the most assured and deft fantasies to have fallen in my lap in recent times. Deliberating on the case of the crushed woman—on whether her family should be compensated for this dereliction of duty by the gods—is Binsa, the protagonist of the novel.
Let me say from the outset that I thoroughly enjoyed this book and have been pressing our regular customers to get it as soon as it comes out. It’s been a while since I’ve come across a fantasy novel so astutely written and compelling in storytelling. There is a maturity to the world-building which recalls Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, and a deftness in character portraiture, which is particularly tricky in the case of anti-heroes (which Binsa is).
In Leow’s world, the gods directly intervene in all aspects of human activity, from influencing natural phenomena to presiding over the governance of city states—including matters concerning goats. This they do through their Rakthis (or Raktha, the masculine form of the noun)—mortals chosen to be avatars for each respective god to become the central governing figure of these theocratic cities. In Binsa’s case, she is Rakthi for the goddess of wisdom, Rashmatun, and governs Bakhtin, one of 10 city states described in the novel. Leow notes thatThe Scarlet Throneis inspired by Nepal’s Kumari Devi tradition where young girls are worshipped as divine manifestations, a tradition which is still in practise today.
Binsa, when we meet her, is already dealing with two crucial problems: first, her tenure as a Rakthi is quickly coming to an end. A canny operator, she has been delaying the inevitable by taking drugs and potions to delay the onset of puberty (Rashmatun chooses pre-pubescent girls exclusively to be her vessel during a Trial of Divinity). Even then, the coterie of priests who surround her and who wield the real political power behind the throne are scheming to replace her with a younger, less experienced (read: more compliant) candidate. Having come from poverty and destitution to become Rakthi, Binsa is all too aware of what awaits should she be removed from her position as the goddesses’ vessel, and will do anything to prevent this from happening.
Second, Binsa may not actually be a vessel for a goddess at all. Instead, what she harbours within her is quite the opposite of divine, namely Ilam, a blood demon which takes the form of a giant cat when it manifests itself. Theirs is not a happy relationship but a transactional one insofar as Binsa needs the powers granted by Ilam to perform her duties as a goddess, while Ilam needs Binsa to feed and strengthen him. Ilam is the bequest of her dead mother, a blood shaman, who has taken—and dealt—great pains to elevate Binsa to her current role as Rakthi, including viciously tampering with Binsa’s Trial of Divinity.
Binsa fears and resents Ilam, who is both a threat to her soul and a painful reminder of her abusive mother. Nevertheless, she knows that she needs his power to maintain her position as Rakthi, which means giving in to Ilam’s demands for blood and sacrifice, further setting her down the path of blood shamanism. Moreover, she needs Ilam to get even more powerful as the other Rakthas and Rakthis are conspiring with her priests to depose her. This means more blood, more sacrifice and the further loosening of her already weakening grip on humanity and precious few relationships, particularly a burgeoning maternal/sororal relationship with Medha, her successor.
Leow, in a comment on Goodreads, says that the best way to describe The Scarlet Throne, is “messy”, and she is absolutely bang-on. Messy means complex; messy means layers and texture; messy means moral quandaries. But messy, if done right, also means interesting and satisfying, and Leow does get it right. Her world is rich and finely detailed, but these are judiciously revealed so as to not disrupt the rhythm and flow of the story—a pitfall of many a new fantasy writer. There is, of course, magic and demons and gods, but these aren’t the standout elements of the story. Instead, what takes centre stage in the book is the palace (temple) intrigue, political conspiracy and Binsa’s reluctant transformation into her mother’s heir.
A truly enjoyable book made all the more impressive by the fact that this is Leow’s debut novel.
The Scarlet Throne is available in-store and online. We’re also hosting an event with Amy on 5 Oct. Get tix here.
When Johor-born animator Erica Engwon an Eisner Award for her webcomicFried Rice in 2020, she was 21 years old and still a college student. The semi-autobiographical, slice-of-life webcomic based on her experience of applying to an elite art school after secondary school was something she started as a personal project.
Erica submitted her webcomic to be considered for awards, and she won the Eisner and then a Ringo after. While it gave her exposure after that thanks to the numerous articles written about her, it wasn’t exactly a game-changer. She shopped around for an agent to represent her and get the book published but got rejected each time because she didn’t have a “track record” as a published writer and illustrator. She finally settled on self-publishing Fried Rice and promoting it herself, and that’s how we came to host her for an author event at Lit Books on 1 June, 2024.
Below are edited excerpts from the delightful conversation our co-founder Fong Min Hun had with her.
Why is it called Fried Rice? In the book, there’s actually no picture or mention of fried rice. When I was writing it, I was still in college in Subang and I was really missing my family. I was thinking the vibe of the story that I want to tell is like this home-cooked meal—it makes you feel nostalgic. My mum’s favourite comfort food is fried rice and we’re always eating that at home. So, I created this Spotify playlist with all the songs that inspired me, and then I titled it Fried Rice, and it was just a placeholder title because it didn’t make sense—it wouldn’t make sense to anyone else except for me. But then I started posting the comic online in September, won the award in June the following year, and after that, I felt like the title kind of stuck. And then I kind of liked that it didn’t make a lot of sense either, so yeah, I kept it.
How autobiographical is it? What are the parallels between your life and Fried Rice? I actually knew who the main character was gonna be before I started writing this book, and I started drawing her in my sketchbooks. I liked her design, but I didn’t have a story to put her in. At first, I was writing all sorts of things—she’s gonna go on a gap year, go on holiday and find herself. But it didn’t feel authentic because I never experienced that.
And then, I got rejected from art school, but at the same time, it was a really bittersweet experience for me because I was experiencing rejection, but my family was all around me. I wanted to write about that because it felt interesting to me. So, I took very specific experiences from my memories, like, finding out about the rejection email during Chinese New Year on my cousin’s laptop—that’s real—but I kind of rearranged the timeline of events to create a story arch that makes sense. But the main character is not me because I designed her and I thought about her before I knew what I was going to write about. I made the main character not myself because I could take as many liberties as I wanted to. So I can’t really say it’s all about me. I was taking experiences that I felt were useful narrative wise.
Tell us about the actual production of the webcomic itself. This is your first narrative-driven, long-form piece of work, yes? Yeah. Before that, I was drawing and writing really short comics and posting them online. I was posting them on Instagram and on Twitter… I was like, man, I don’t want to write Tweets for the rest of my life. I want to write something long. I want to learn how to craft a story from start to finish. So this was an experiment to see whether I could do it.
Did you draw influences from other webcomics out there or graphic novels? What are some that have influenced or inspired you? At that time, I was reading On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden. The whole thing is online and you can read it for free. So for a college student, that’s like a gold mine… And then there’s This One Summer by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki—I love the illustrations—and Portugal and Equinoxes by Cyril Pedrosa. I felt like, oh, someone’s telling a really interesting and experimental kind of story in comics and not using ink. I’ve only ever seen those Marvel comics drawn in ink all the time. I thought it was really interesting to see different art styles in comics.
Another one is Himawari House by Harmony Becker, but that came out after Fried Rice. That’s one of my favourite graphic novels ever.
Do you find scripting and writing more difficult than drawing and illustrating or the other way around? Writing is 100% more difficult. The drawing part, well, it’s hard to come up with the compositions and the colours as well. But for me, that part is just getting it done, you know, churning out the drawings. But writing is when it could be anything so it feels really daunting.
There’s also the storytelling elements as well. Is this something that you were trained to do in school, or something that you just picked up yourself from reading other people’s work? I learned film language in school, because I studied animation and also elements of acting and things like camera angles. I read a lot of screenplays and books about film language. So yeah, I would say that I learned about how to make comics from learning about films.
I loved Roma by Alfonso Cuarón, who did big movies like Gravity. But Roma was a really personal story to him from his childhood about a domestic helper that they had. And he had said that he wanted to make a movie like this for a long time and finally got the chance to. I didn’t want to be like 50 years old and then only get the courage to make something about a personal story that mattered to me. So that kind of inspired me to do Fried Rice.
How did you think about pacing? Was that something that you constantly had in your mind, or were you just happy to let it play out? Yeah, I was thinking about pacing. I would read through the comic again and again, just to make sure that it felt right. The dialogue and everything had to sound good, and the pictures had to flow in a certain way. And I watched a lot of Eric Romero movies, which someone described as the experience of watching paint dry. So, it’s a bit slow. But I don’t know; it just felt nice. It felt like I was watching someone live their life in front of me, which was the kind of pacing that I wanted.
Malaysian writer Yeoh Jo-Ann burst onto the local literary scene when her debut novel, Impractical Uses of Cake, won the Epigram Fiction Prize in 2018. Together with Honey Ahmad and Diana Yeong of Two Book Nerds Talking, we spoke with Jo-Ann about her book over a Facebook Live session at the height of the lockdowns in 2020.
This year, we finally met in-person at a recent in-store event celebrating the publication of her second book, Deplorable Conversations with Cats and Other Distractions. The novel is about Lucky Lee who has everything—wealth, charm, good looks—but does little with it. He coasts through life and takes things for granted until his sister, Pearl, his only surviving family member, suddenly dies. As he struggles on without her, he begins to hear her cat talking to him.
Jo-Ann started writing Deplorable Conversations with Cats during the pandemic and worked on it during a three-month writer’s residency at the Kerouac Project in Orlando, Florida, US. She recalls, “I finished most of it but couldn’t end it. I didn’t know how… Then in January 2023, I somehow opened it up again. I read it and suddenly, it came to me. I knew how to end it and, within five days, the thing was done.”
She recounted this and more during the hour-long conversation with Lit Books’ co-founder Elaine Lau and our lovely audience on the evening of 27 April. The following are edited excerpts from the chat.
On where this novel comes from: The book is about grief, but it’s also about sibling relationships and how difficult they are because they’re so complex. These are the people we grew up with, the people we know first, and the peers we know first. Your first betrayal and many other things was by a sibling, and they know you the way no one else does because they’re there right from the beginning.
I hadn’t really explored sibling relationships very much. When I talk to people about relationships, I find that I tend to have conversations about my relationship with my mother or whoever I’m dating at that time, stuff like that. But the sibling relationship tends to be something we don’t talk about very much, especially the strange, constantly shifting dynamic of someone who is a peer and yet not a peer, someone you didn’t choose. It’s that kind of encumbrance. But at the same time, if you need to be honest, it’s a sibling you can be completely honest with because they already know who you are.
So this is a book that explores grief and the many facets of it and how there are no right ways to grieve. It’s also about family and sibling relationships and how they can be beautiful and difficult and extremely frustrating. And somewhere in there is a talking cat because my mother is a cat woman of the first order, and I grew up having to play second fiddle to quite a few cats.
On grief and recognising how it changes a person: We talk about how there are different ways to grieve and this is a thing that we all accept. I feel like we grapple less with how grief changes us and how we view the world and how we interact with people. When you think about dealing with grief, you think about coping mechanisms and things like that, but you don’t think about how grief really does change you. The process you go through when you’re dealing with loss and all of that, it affects you and it affects the people you interact with. That was what I was curious about also.
So in the novel, what I do try and grapple with is how Lucky is changed by losing his sister, grieving for her and not understanding exactly how to deal with it. It’s that kind of struggle that I was grappling with throughout the novel.
On creating the book’s main characters: The main character of this novel is called Lucky Lee, right? He is handsome, he is rich, he is extremely privileged and therefore, a little unlikable. It’s not easy to identify with this rich man who has everything and doesn’t have to work. But I feel that grief is something that is not the privilege of the poor or rich. I wanted to explore having a character who was unlikable and yet you find yourself identifying with them somehow, even if I definitely didn’t want to.
On creating the wonderful cast of supporting characters: The reason why the supporting cast for this one had to be so strong was because Lucky is really an irritating little thing. There are only so many ways that you can spell out that someone is irritating and irresponsible and hasn’t got ambition. What I did was to have the people around him communicate that through their experiences with him and the daily frustrations that they have to put up with because he is the man that he is. So it’s the effects of Lucky’s character that you see throughout the book, all the consequences of the actions that he hadn’t thought through or hadn’t bothered very much with or things that he was supposed to do but didn’t. You experience Lucky through them more than him doing things.
On how a talking cat came into the picture: I’ve always wanted animals to be able to talk back to me, because I cannot resist speaking to animals when I see them.
I always wonder where cats go. Being from a household where I am a second-class citizen, I do wonder where the more superior beings go off to when they’re not at home terrorizing me. I often wondered if there was a parallel society of some sort. Do they congregate? What do they talk about? Do they talk about us? Is there a plot to overthrow mankind?
So, I guess that part of the book where the cat walks off and meets the Raja Kuching and all the cats help her and do things, that’s my imagination running a little wild.
On incorporating food into the narrative: My experience in my family is that it’s easier to talk when your hands are occupied, when you’re eating or cooking, or when you’re preparing stuff like chopping chili padi—it’s easier to talk to your mother about things.
I think that’s what worked its way into the first novel and the second one, because I feel that it’s a vehicle for us when it comes to expressing ourselves. In the novel, what you’ll find is that a lot of the difficult conversations between Lucky and Pearl or when they’re fond of each other is when they’re helping each other out in the kitchen or fighting over something in the kitchen. But they spend a lot of their time in the kitchen doing things together, and that’s where all the family drama happens.
I am also very food motivated, like most cats. In order for me to sometimes write a chapter, I must know what I get to eat after I finish the chapter.
Truth, they say, is stranger than fiction. This is especially so in the world of physics where the behaviour of very large and the very small defy the causal relationships that we have come to expect from our mundane senses. So much so that if some quantum theories are correct, reality is barely hanging on by the thinnest of threads, and the slightest change in fundamental atomic structure could bring about the end of the universe. So they say.
Koji Suzuki’s Edge, winner of the 2012 Shirley Jackson Prize—awarded for “outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror and dark fantasy”—is based on that very premise. In the book, our universe is undergoing a phase shift. It’s not entirely clear what that means but essentially, the universe is coming to an end. An event involving a black hole at the edge of our galaxy is bringing about change to the structure of reality, but rather than this meaning that the universe is being destroyed, it’s simply winking out of existence.
Back on earth, people have started disappearing at an alarming rate near fault lines—places where tectonic plates beneath the earth’s crust meet. Our protagonist, science journalist Saeko Kuriyama, is working together with a television studio to produce an exposé on these mysterious disappearances which seem to be happening with greater frequency. Saeko has a personal stake in the matter: Her own father disappeared without a trace 18 years earlier and she has yet to give up finding him. She believes the current spate of disappearances are related, and clues along the way seem to be pointing her in that direction. Meanwhile, her prodigious science brain suspects something else is up.
It’s difficult to describe Edge, which seems at times to be a plot-driven existential-horror book, but at other times a discursive science text. Unlike the Ring trilogy which shot Suzuki to fame because of the ingenuity of the plot device—paranormal, techno-virus, as it turns out—Edge is limited by the boundaries of science. It’s clear from the book that Suzuki wants to be faithful to the possibilities offered by physics as we understand them but this generally makes for poor storytelling. To help his protagonists understand the existential threat they are facing and ratchet up the tension, Suzuki introduces various characters to be repositories of information: a fortune teller, several scientists, and, to the detriment of the book, an angel/devil figure which explains everything neatly before the novel’s climax.
It’s hard to write a novel that holds a knife-edge tension when the focal element is the disappearance of random people. From this perspective, Edge has a similar narrative to Christian Rapture movies and books, where people mysteriously disappear ahead of the anticipated apocalypse. As with the Rapture narrative, these disappearances can only hold dramatic value if it is indicative of some larger existential issue—the apocalypse in the Rapture narrative and the end of the universe in Suzuki’s novel. The end result is a fairly imbalanced novel where readers are invited to invest in the lives of these protagonists, but who never really develop to a point where you care for them. Even Saeko’s narrative is fairly erratic with promising bits that fail to materialise. In fact, it seems that her only proper role is to be a vehicle for Suzuki to explicate some exploratory point on physics, astronomy or evolution.
So it’s not a great book. And yet, I finished it and would still recommend it to the right sort of reader. To explain why, I need to delve a bit into my past where I entertained the possibility of a career in mathematics several lifetimes ago as a young undergraduate student. Alas, this course of study was quickly abandoned following the discovery of a preternatural inability to do basic calculus, although I had a slightly higher than average talent and disposition for number theory. Ruminations on the latter appear not infrequently in the book, and the bits that touch on math and science are intriguing, and sufficiently so to keep a person with a similar disposition to chug on through to the end.
The novel lets itself down at the end with a literal deus ex machina.
Malaysian writer Vanessa Chan had always dabbled in writing fiction. But it took what she called a “millennial existential crisis” to propel her to pursue it seriously—she left her job in communications at Facebook and enrolled in a writing graduate programme in New York City.
What then started out as a short story assignment for class where Vanessa wrote about a teenage girl going through checkpoints during the Japanese occupation of Malaya in World War II eventually turned into her debut novel, The Storm We Made, published in January 2024. The novel is about a housewife, Cecily, and how her decision to collaborate with the Japanese occupiers brought about political and personal devastation for the nation and her family, in particular her three children, Jujube, Abel, and Jasmine.
Vanessa recalls the moment she had a novel in the making: “I got a handwritten note from my professor, and it said, ‘This is actually not a short story… This is actually something more. All the air left the room when I read it, and my breath caught in my throat. There’s something I want you to protect. I think this is an outline or your brain telling you that this might be the beginning of your life’s work.”
But Vanessa didn’t think she would write historical fiction. “I always thought I would write like a millennial angst novel about a girl doing millennial things. But then the pandemic happened. I experienced a series of personal griefs that made it hard for me to get up and get out of bed in the morning. And I needed something to get me out of bed, and so I started writing this book.”
We had the pleasure of hosting Vanessa in an author event at Lit Books on 16 March, 2024 where she spoke at length about the intricacies of her novel and writing life. The following are edited excerpts from the hour-long conversation she had with Lit Books co-founder, Elaine Lau and our wonderful audience.
What was the process like turning a short story into a full-length novel? It was so hard. I had always written short stories before. Short stories are great; they work for my very rigid personality. There are a series of parameters, a timeframe, a limited number of characters. Your story has to end by a certain time.
Writing a novel is like wandering in metaphorical darkness in a forest, and you think you arrive at a lake or something but it’s a mirage. It’s not ended, and you keep wandering. You have to be open to getting somewhere, realizing that may or may not be it, and just continuing to write into the darkness until you reach something else. As a rigid person who loves structure, that was a nightmare. But you just have to write into the chaos and hope for the best, even if you’re like the most detailed outliner in the world. You’ll have to toss that outline aside at some point and be like, let’s start over and figure it out. That was weird for me.
I also chose to write two timelines and four points of views, which was not easy. It was ridiculous. I don’t know why I did.
Some of the stories in this book are from your grandmother. Can you tell us more about that? My grandma inspired this book and some of the facts came from what she calls a memory book. It was a book where towards the later part of her life, where she was worrying that she was forgetting things, she would write down stories of her life, some of it during the war, some of it pre-war, and some of it post-war. That book was a really wonderful resource for me, both as a writer, but just as a person and a member of this family. I want to note that the book, she always told me, was written for public consumption.
So, some of the stories are from there, but a lot of the stories from this novel are from conversations I had with her growing up. When you don’t finish your food, my grandmother would be like, ‘You know, during the Japanese times, we had to mix in tapioca with our rice because we didn’t have enough to eat.’ There were stories like that, both the ugly and the good, and they just sort of got embedded in my mind. And when I was ready to write it, that’s kind of what came out.
Tell us about how you wrote the characters in this book, starting with the housewife, Cecily. What were you trying to convey with her story? When I first started writing this book, Cecily didn’t exist. The novel was only about three sad children living through the war because that was what I knew. I knew about children living through the war. That was the experience my grandmother and her siblings had.
I started writing most of this during the pandemic. I was in New York City… And then my mother and my uncle passed away and I couldn’t even go home. I was just filled with grief and rage. I felt robbed of the ability to be with my family, to celebrate the people we loved who had died. And then I’d wake up every day to write about these sad children whose lives are just getting sadder. I needed to give myself a little bit of joy. I needed to give myself something with an element of the ridiculous.
And so, I decided to write about this slightly insane woman who gets to run about all of Kuala Lumpur being a spy. I only wrote her as a spy because I used to really like to watch spy dramas. I was just gonna throw it in there and we can always take it out if it doesn’t work out. I’m gonna give myself some agency via this woman who gets to be irresponsible, make mostly bad decisions, be really, really horny and just do stuff. And that’s what happened. I wrote this character and I guess she stuck because she has since become the central emotional core of the novel. The book has now become a family drama with touches of espionage thriller.
About her morally grey circumstances, I strongly believe that morality is a function of the circumstances we are in. I believe that we don’t know if our principles, our morality, all the things that we believe in will hold if we are faced with the threat of not being able to survive or to have to save our families. We can hope that it is. We can hope that our desire to be kind and wonderful and good does hold. But I don’t always think that is the case. And Cecily, I think, had the best of intentions.
One of the children, Abel, went through a truly harrowing experience in the labour camps. Was it difficult to write these horrific events? Can tell us how you approached Abel’s story arc? Some of the anecdotes from Abel’s story—who has to live through the camp and who encounters people who cut themselves to use the blood to write and draw memories from the camp in order to make a record of it because they didn’t know if they were going to survive—anecdotes like that, Western audiences often assume are the fictions that I make up. But the truest part of the book is that section because that is a lot of what happened; that was what I was able to research. There’s a fair number of records available because there were a lot of European POWs in those camps.
It was emotional to write, to understand that the 1940s wasn’t that long ago, that people we know had been through something like that. I get asked a lot whether or not I should have made it a little bit less gory or a little bit less confronting. I don’t believe in gratuitous violence, but I believe in honesty.
What do you hope readers will take away from this book? I want people to remember Cecily, Juju, Abel, and Jasmine’s stories, and that doesn’t mean I want people to remember every plot twist. I hope that audiences remember how they felt when they read the book, because like I said, a lot of our history doesn’t really have a place in the larger canon, and the only way for it to enter the larger canon is if people remember how they felt when they read books like mine, and they talk about it, keep it in the conversation, and remember that experience—because shared experiences make history.
Limited signed copies of The Storm We Made are available in-store and online.
Malaysian lawyer-turned-children’s books author Kimberly Lee was just trying her luck. In late 2020, she submitted her picture book in a Twitter pitch contest called PitMad in hopes of attracting the attention of US book agents and editors.
But the mother of two boys wasn’t expecting much “save for learning from the whole experience”, she recalls over an email interview with Lit Books. Lee had written a picture book set in a Peranakan household about a boy named Jin who volunteers to be a kitchen hand for his grandmother who’s cooking a big Lunar New Year’s eve dinner. His aunts dismiss him because the kitchen is no place for boys, but his grandmother thinks otherwise.
“My pitch suddenly took off and the retweets and positive comments started flooding in,” says Lee, who is managing editor of parenting platform makchic.com. “This then led me to connect with my agent, who submitted my book to several publishing houses for consideration in early 2021. Very soon after, Boys Don’t Fryattracted attention and wound up being sold at auction to my wonderful editor at Macmillan’s FSG. It was a bit of a whirlwind, to be honest.”
Boys Don’t Frycame out in December 2023. The story, beautifully illustrated by Singaporean artist Charlene Chua, challenges gender norms and celebrates intergenerational relationships. The author tells us how this all came about in our Q&A.
Can you share with us your background, and how you got into writing children’s books? Writing has always been my first love. As an only child (with an overly-active imagination), stories became my first friends — along with my wonderful mother, who brought me up on a steady diet of magical, made-up tales throughout my childhood.
My love for storytelling ultimately led me down the path as a lawyer, where I remained in litigation practice for several years and placed my dreams of becoming an author on the backburner. After starting my young family, I took a step back from practice. Somehow, I stumbled back into my love for writing amidst motherhood, endless pandemic-induced lockdowns and finding new purpose in this new season of my life.
Children’s books serve as such powerful mirrors and windows for our young. To play a part, however small, in shaping young minds and guiding them through their understanding of the world, is the greatest privilege.
What was the impetus to write Boys Don’t Fry? I’ve always had a deep love and respect for the wonderful food and family I grew up with and Boys Don’t Fry is the culmination of this. This book serves as a fond love letter to my Peranakan/Nyonya upbringing and was born from a desire to share and showcase this culture, its colours and its magnificent cuisine to a greater audience.
More importantly, at the heart of this story is a message about honouring the desire in every child’s heart to feel seen, valued and included.
Admittedly, great chefs run in my family — I was brought up on tales of how my great-grandmother’s dishes would practically bring grown men to rapturous tears — and my mum, aunts and other family members are continuing this same tradition. I love cooking as well, though there’s such a specific art and painstaking detail to Nyonya dishes… I still have much to learn!
Boys Don’t Fry is your second children’s book after What If?, which introduces children to the concepts of body boundaries and personal safety. Was it easier or more challenging to write a story versus a nonfiction book? Both mediums present their own unique sets of strengths and challenges. Boys Don’t Fry was a story that contained some elements of my own personal experiences, so in a sense, that made it easier to communicate. That being said, my challenge was to present this subculture and the story’s intended message in a way that was universally understood.
As for What If?, this book is unique in that it contains both fictional and non-fictional elements. While it is rooted in non-fiction, there are still fictional and even, fantastical elements in the scenarios posed, which allow a young reader to think about their possible reaction to events that range from the silly to the more serious.
With the book’s discussion guide, my co-author Liyana Taff and I had to carefully ensure that the information contained was reflective of the research we undertook (our content was guided and informed by the UN Conventions on the Rights of the Child, the Protective Behaviour Framework for personal safety and The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children’s (UK) PANTS rule), as well as the extensive consultations we had with experts such as Child Protection Officers, child psychiatrists, teachers and NGOs. So it was the research process, more than anything else, that was the most time-consuming (although ultimately, rewarding).
Tell us about the illustrator Charlene Chua and how she came to be on this project. What was the process like working with her to bring your story to life? Charlene was a delight to work with — there was honestly no one else I could have imagined serving as the illustrator for Boys Don’t Fry. Charlene had left a comment in a tweet expressing her excitement about there being a book centred on Peranakan/Nyonya culture, and once I sold this manuscript, I knew immediately that I wanted her on board as the illustrator! Being from Singapore herself (and with a great-grandmother who was adopted into a Peranakan/Nyonya family), Charlene was familiar with the nuances of our Southeast Asian way of life and brought the book’s characters and setting to life in such a vivid and authentic way.
It was also such a fun process working with her on ensuring accuracy in the book’s illustrations — from finding references from old personal family photos, to taking videos from my visit to Melaka’s Baba & Nyonya Heritage Museum to give her a “feel” of the space as inspiration for the book.
Are you working on your next children’s book? If yes, could you share what it would be about? Yes! I’ve just announced my upcoming book, 100 Days, which will be released by Macmillan in Spring 2025. It’s a story that centres on the traditional 100-day celebration observed by many Asian cultures (including the Malaysian-Chinese community), and follows the journey of a newly minted big sister as she grapples with the arrival of her baby sister. As the days go by, she slowly discovers a love that deepens with time and learns to embrace sisterhood through the changing seasons.
Locally, with the wonderful team at makchic and the brilliant Delia Razak as illustrator, we’re currently working on a book on internet safety for kids (featuring several characters from the same universe as What If? and serving as a follow-up in an ongoing picture book series) and aimed at a 2025 release.
I have been a big fan of Sheila Armstrong since coming across her debut collection of short stories, How to Gut a Fish and you can read my review here. In that review, I gushed about the Shirley Jackson-esque flavour of her writing, and marvelled at the seamless transitions in her writing. I was therefore very excited when Bloomsbury sent me a review copy of her debut novel Falling Animals, which I finished months ago and promptly let procrastination (in writing this review) get the better of me.
Falling Animals is brilliant. (And what an amazing cover!)
Putatively a mystery concerning a dead man, Falling Animals is told from the perspectives of the villagers living in a small Irish tourist village by the beach where the corpse is found. The stage opens with the story of the waste collector who has been hired to dispose of the beached carcass of a seal. Though not an everyday occurrence, it happens regularly enough that there is a checklist of kit that needs bringing, and a proper handling sequence to avoid a revolting end. All this happens at the break of day, where dawning light further illuminates the props and setting of the stage: the skeletons of a shipwreck and a whale; an exposed beach recovering from an unseasonal thunderstorm; and a serene dead man sat cross-legged on the wind-swept dunes.
An unidentified dead man is a question mark, a challenge. Who is he? How did he get here? How did he die? Why did he die? No one seems to know the answer to these questions, not even the police and the forensic pathologist whose raison d’etre in these situations is to come up with the answers.
The sergeant’s eyebrows come together into one hard line when she presents him with the autopsy results, and he asks if she is sure. She isn’t, of course, isn’t sure at all, but his questioning makes her bristle and dig in her heels… But still, she cannot make up facts that are not there. Death by natural causes.
The unnamed man will be buried in a public grave, but we will hear more from those who have crossed paths with the dead man. Among them, the village gossip who first finds the body; the barman who owns the pub in which she holds court; the grieving mother whose story is entwined with the wrecked ship; an artist who paints the ship; and the ship, to which the dead man is inextricably linked. Armstrong weaves a tangled web, and though each narrative strand seems individual and unconnected, a portrait slowly reveals itself with each turn of the page.
As each vignette gets told, our circle gradually closes in on the identity of the dead man. But perhaps that isn’t really the point of the story. Even as more light is shed on the identity of the dead man, we come to learn more about the chorus of voices, who they are, how they got there, and why. We come to learn of their grief, their guilt, and importantly, their redemption. The stories of those who come across the dead man are tinged with melancholy and regret, and reflects primaeval truths of the human condition.
She watches the wrecked ship from the cafe’s window every day, seeing the tide wash around it, rust climb up its sides, the hull buckle and break. Sometimes she suspects it steered itself into the sandbank, broken and exhausted by whatever years it had spent on the water, whatever weights it had carried, whatever sadness it had soaked up. As metaphors for her life go, it is slightly on the nose, but she will take what she can get. Candlesticks and doilies are not for everyone.
Falling Animals isn’t the sort of story that invites the reader to go on a journey of discovery; instead, it’s one where the entire story has always already been there, and the author is slowly unfurling the tapestry from one small corner. The book is dark, elegiac and at times unsettling, but what emerges is a quietly beautiful tale helped along by Armstrong’s poetic sensibilities and sparkling clarity in her writing. From this perspective, Falling Animals bears strong similarities with other novels of quietude, such as John McGregor’s Reservoir 13 and John Williams’ Stoner.
My favourite book of 2023.
Falling Animals is available both in-store and on our online store.
2023 marks 60 years since the territories of Malaya, Singapore, Sabah and Sarawak were brought together to form Malaysia. Much has transpired in the decades since, not the least of which was the ousting of Singapore from this alliance just a couple years later. Nevertheless, our two nations still share a bond, though it may be at times a fractious one.
Two years ago, Daryl Lim Wei Jie, a poet, translator and literary critic from Singapore, had this idea to commemorate our two nations’ shared history with an anthology that would bring together writers from both countries to engage creatively and critically with this sense of entwinement. He roped in fellow Singaporean writer Hamid Roslan onto the project, as well as two Malaysian writers and editors, Melizarani T. Selva and William Tham. The result is The Second Link, put forth by Singapore publisher Marshall Cavendish in September, and which we had the pleasure to launch at Lit Books on Malaysia Day, 16th Sept, 2023.
With the Malaysia-Singapore relationship as its central theme, the book is an anthology of fiction, essays, short monographs on specific topics, poetry, and photography. Expertly curated, each piece is reflective of our thoughts during quieter moments: Who are we? What are we doing? Where are we going? How did things get to be the way they are today? In other words, questions that circulate in our subconscious, hidden beneath the froth of our day-to-day. The Second Link does a superb job in bringing these ponderings to the forefront, and is an excellent anthology that deserves a place in the regional literary canon.
At the launch, three of the four editors — Daryl, Melizar, and William — sat down with Lit Books founder Fong Min Hun and a packed audience to talk about the book. Six of the contributors were also at hand to read snippets from their pieces. The following are edited excerpts from the conversation with the editors.
Min Hun: I’d like to know more about the provenance of this anthology. Daryl, you were the mastermind. How did this idea come into your head? Daryl: I’m a student of history and that’s really where I come from. I did my undergrad and master’s in history, and I’ve always been very interested in Singapore’s and Malaysia’s history. To me as a historian, dates and significant anniversaries are very important. Two years ago, I started to think about how in 2023 it’ll be the 60th anniversary of the formation of Malaysia and also of the merger between Singapore and Malaysia.
As the idea grew prominence and force in my mind, I felt that it’s very odd that at least from Singapore’s side, no one really thinks of it as the 60th anniversary of the formation of Malaysia. In fact, if you go on Singapore news right now, what is really being given prominence is the 100th birthday of Lee Kuan Yew. But then again, that makes you think what a fortuitous coincidence that Kuan Yew’s birthday was the day Malaysia was formed. To me, the conjunction of those two events was a call to action in my mind that something had to be done. What I wanted to do is to bring together writers from Singapore and Malaysia, and part of that reason was because I had already been quite involved in the Malaysian scene.
I was a good friend of the late [Malaysian poet] Wong Phui Nam, and he and I actually had a really interesting and unusual relationship considering that we were almost 50 years apart in terms of age. But we somehow became very good friends after I met him. I loved his poetry, and he, sadly died last year. So that connection, the significance of the dates, the fact that I felt Singaporeans were going to forget — and they did forget, as the news tells you — made me want to do this. The other reason is I think in the past, the ties between Singapore and Malaysia in the 60s, 70s and 80s were much stronger between the two groups of writers. Famously there was this anthology from the 70s called The Second Tongue, which Edwin Thumboo edited, and it was a poetry from Malaysia and Singapore.
Min Hun: How did you assemble this motley crew of editors? Daryl: It wasn’t very structured at first. Actually, the one who’s not here, Hamid Roslan, might be the first person I approached. I felt he would be perfect because he has very interesting thoughts on being Malay in Singapore. I thought he brought an interesting perspective. Then I got to know Melizar quite well… I think she, being a Malaysian Indian working in Singapore, again brings an interesting perspective — you’re away from home, but you’re very close to home; things are very similar, but also totally different. William was brought in by Melizar because William has a more academic background, and so some of the more academic essays in the book were shaped by him. He brought a lot of that deep knowledge and thinking, which I think gives quite a significant depth to this book.
Min Hun: William, in addition to being a writer, has also edited his own anthology of essays before. How did you find the experience this time around with The Second Link? William: With every single book that comes out, it’s always quite an adventure because while you have a general idea of the mechanics of the process when it comes to soliciting entries, for example, and working with individual contributors, every book does have its own particular special trajectories. They go from one place to another without you ever knowing how things will turn up in the end. For this anthology, there’s a lot of stuff for you to parse through. There’s a lot more agency on the part of the reader this time. Rather than the editorial sense of telling you what to expect, it’s very much an invitation to walk through the entries one after another to decide, in terms of interpreting the text themselves, what constitutes fact, what constitute fiction, and the idea of generic boundaries as well, and how these are all very much permeable and fluid. This was a very different experience in that regard.
Min Hun: Melizar, can you tell us your experience of working on The Second Link? Melizar: I had the opportunity and privilege of editing mostly Singaporean writers, which is very strange how that all came together. During the editorial process, we received about 70 submissions via the open call, and we also invited a few other writers to contribute because we wanted to balance out the themes — we didn’t want all these tired tropes in the book. Once we received the pool of stories, Daryl, William, Hamid and I got on Zoom, and we asked each other which stories we each wanted to work on. We chose stories that we had an affinity for, and that we wanted to work with the writer on. Ultimately we asked ourselves, do we want to be advocates for this narrative? So that’s how we chose the stories that we had.
Daryl: What’s different about this book is that the submissions we received were not completed pieces. What we asked the writers to submit were pitches — the majority of them had not written the story or piece that you have now in the book. They just gave an idea and also some examples of their past writing. What this means is effectively we had 30 projects ongoing at one time. We were each working with the writers to shape their various pieces, and along the way we would check in. In some ways that explains why the book is special because there was a kind of mental coming together in that everyone converged on the same themes and the things we were looking for. That makes the book a bit more special and why I think we were able to make something cohesive, although people were doing lots of different things.
Contributors of the book read a portion from their piece at the book launch. From left: Malachi Edwin Vethamani, Sofia Mariah Ma, Ng Yi-Sheng, Sumitra Selvaraj, Tse Hao Guang, and Sheena Gurbakhash.
Min Hun: I’d like to come back to the title of the book, The Second Link. You’ve already mentioned that it’s a homage to The Second Tongue. Is there a more abstract hidden meaning to it as well? Daryl: Yeah, I guess in some ways The Second Tongue was Edwin Thumboo gathering all these Singaporean and Malaysian poets to prove to the British, the Americans, all these so-called native speakers, that we could write poetry in English. With this sequel, we don’t need to prove it anymore; they are no longer in the picture. It’s not about the tongue that is in question; the focus is on ourselves and the relationship between the two countries, which I think, at least from the Singaporean perspective, we often take for granted.
Min Hun: William, with some of the academic essays — especially the one by Jonathan Chan, which I enjoyed tremendously, profiling two enfants terribles and their opposing viewpoints in terms of searching for identity — is this question of a missing sense of self something you find intellectually interesting? William: In many ways it actually ties in to a lot of the work that I’ve been doing as part of my postgraduate studies, different ideas of self as well as that relationship of self to a particular national identity. And I think this might be a point that ties together a few ideas that we’ve been talking about today, like the idea of Malaysian-ness or Singaporean-ness, but also as alluded to in quite a few of the pieces that are scattered throughout the book, this idea of what other kinds of imaginaries could look like. It’s sort of like the Malayan vision that was very much in the ad in the immediate post-war period. This of course all gets intertwined with questions of decolonisation, empire, but also in a lot of different ways, that idea of what was then the Malay states as well as Singapore as a broader shared national imaginary. This anthology is very much a way for us to reflect upon the different ways in which we imagine what the country could look like.
Even as we talk about today’s 60th anniversary of the formation of Malaysia, one aspect that I think gets overlooked a lot is how in some of the promotional material that was created to celebrate the formation 60 years ago, there was one song called Lima Negara or Five Countries. The fifth mission country in this case was Brunei. What we knew as Malaysia didn’t last quite as long as those working in highest levels would’ve liked to think. So again, this is an invitation for us to think about the different ways in which we constitute ourselves in relation to the imagination states that have emerged.
Get a copy of The Second Link from our physical store or online.
Marzahn, Mon Amour, the Dublin Literary Award 2023 winner by Katja Oskamp (translated by Jo Heinrich), brims with warmth. Part memoir and part collective history, Marzahn is a portrait of the eponymous Berlin district, its inhabitants and Oskamp’s relationships with them. It is therefore perplexing that the publisher had unwisely included the all-too-familiar “This book is a work of fiction” caveat in the edition notice of the book when this is clearly not the case.
On the one hand, this is typical fare: an attempt by the publisher to dissemble and taichi legal liability away. But from a reader’s perspective, it is impossible and unjust to read Marzahn as a pure work of fiction. In doing so, we do great disservice to the writer, the book and the book’s subjects. Especially in Marzahn where the author’s intention is clear throughout the book: Here are these people and here are their stories. Read and bear witness, for these stories and these lives matter! Clearly, it wouldn’t matter so much if these stories and lives were merely “coincidental” as the caveat would have us believe.
This issue aside, Marzahn, Mon Amouris a splendid book that is touching without falling into the pitfalls of whimsy and over-sentimentality. The narrator of the book (read: Oskamp) is a former professional writer who has retrained as a chiropodist and is working at a beauty salon in Marzahn, a Berlin district which was part of the former German Democratic Republic. The book begins with her decision to change careers in her middle-age, a decision, she says, that was partly due to a setback with her writing career, but also by the changing seasons of her life:
I was forty-four years old when I reached the middle of the big lake. My life had grown stale: my offspring had flown the nest, my other half was ill and my writing, which had kept me busy until then, was more than a little iffy. I was carrying something bitter within me, completing the invisibility that befalls women over forty.
This struggle against invisibility is a central theme of the book. Marzahn, for one, is an overlooked district that would not be regarded as an ‘iconic’ German district or a must-see for tourists to Berlin. Developed as a model socialist city in the 1970s, Marzahn once held the dubious honour of being the largest expanse of plattenbau prefabricated tower blocks (read: concrete jungle) in Europe. The district was meant to be one of the shining examples of the central planning prowess of the German Democratic Republic, but the fall of the Berlin Wall saw an exodus of young, progressive people to pastures greener. Marzahn subsequently became home to socialist die-hards, and is today still regarded as a bastion for the German far-right.
Oskamp does not judge. Chapter by chapter, Oskamp tells the stories of her clients, her co-workers and her city with affection without glossing over the sharper corners. Her clients are mainly elderly Marzahnites, former East Germans whose identities were crystallised before German reunification. Despite some of their unique foibles — Herr Pietsch was a right-leaning party organiser in his prime and whose laser-eyed focus on efficiency and order has carried over to his 70s, to the chagrin of his hiking group — these are ordinary people who have lived through the transition from communism to capitalism. There are those among them who have lived admirable lives of sacrifice and duty, but whose status as residents of a district past its prime have consigned them to invisibility.
Having spent time in marginalised cities such as Marzahn, Oskamp’s book tugs firmly at my heartstrings. As a former journalist working in such communities, I can tell you first-hand that these inhabitants are generally closely drawn together and fiercely protective of theirs and their stories. It takes patience and a great deal of empathy before the walls start to come down brick by brick, but the stories and friendships made are usually worth the effort. Chiropody is probably an ideal way of building such relationships; after all, it’s probably quite difficult to hold anyone’s feet for an extended period of time without some chat.
Marzahn is also a book about personal epiphany, the virtues of the small, and the gratification of work dedicated to the service of others. In an interview with The Irish Times, Oskamp said she “saw how people dealt with loneliness, with children leaving, losing their flat, their job, disappointment, and I got a lot out of this on a daily basis. It was really important for me to understand that you can always rely on that: these people supported me, they helped me, and in that moment of my life I was very open to these small, friendly, warm gestures.”
In the book, she describes how her decision to switch from writing to chiropody — a “comedown” of sorts — is greeted by those around her with revulsion, incomprehension and, “worst of all, sympathy.” And yet, this career switch would fundamentally change her life for the better. The bitterness disappears, and she finds that her world is significantly enlarged by her new role in the service of others. Seldom emerges the thought that a small, ordinary life can be more gratifying than one of a higher calling, but it can be so.
“It was very important to me at the time that I wasn’t stuck in the intellectual writing experience, a writer in this writing tower,” Oskamp said in the interview. “If you are in front of your screen all day long you don’t know in the evening what actually made you tired, what we achieved or did not achieve. In chiropody I know every evening what I have done. I know I had 13 or 16 pairs of feet, everybody was happy, everybody was satisfied, everybody left in a better mood than they entered the room, and this is something very satisfying.”
As Voltaire says in Candide, we must cultivate our garden.
Marzahn, Mon Amour is available in-store and on our online shop.
Belfast writer Paul McVeigh made a name for himself as a playwright and writer of comedy shows before he penned his first novel, The Good Son, published in 2015. The novel, which won the Polari Prize and the McCrea Literary Award, is a coming-of-age story of 11-year-old Mickey Donnelly set in Belfast during The Troubles. It is an evocative, thoughtful and well-written book that’s full of humour despite the bleakness of its setting.
We had the privilege to host Paul in an author event at Lit Books on 17 June, 2023, where he charmed us with his warmth and wit. The novel is very much drawn from his own experience of growing up in Belfast during this horrific period of Northern Ireland history, and he tells us that humour was a survival mechanism. He shared with us stories from his life in the hour-long conversation with Min Hun and our audience – the following are edited excerpts from the session.
On the history and personal background that informs the book: I was born in 1968 and that is recognised as the beginning of The Troubles. I thought if I was going to write a book, everything in it I would have to know is absolutely true. In order to do that, I thought I would set it where I grew up and in the environment I grew up in… In Belfast, it was war but they never called it that. They called it The Troubles, which makes it sound like something a little bit annoying, like bad traffic. It minimised what it was – it was actually a war and it was absolutely barbaric.
Where I was born, in Ardoyne, which is where the book is set, at the bottom of my street there were walls and barricades so I couldn’t get out. At the top of my street there were walls and barricades and I couldn’t get out. Two streets away was a Protestant community, and three streets another way was a Protestant community. Ardoyne was unique in that we were surrounded by our enemy. It was like an open-air prison.
The second and probably more damaging thing, because it affected everyone’s psyche, was you couldn’t be different. Any difference was not tolerated at all. You couldn’t have your hair different, you couldn’t wear different clothes, you couldn’t be LGBT, you couldn’t be artistic, you couldn’t want an education because somehow that was an insult. If you wanted an education, you were trying to better yourself and that meant where you were at wasn’t good and you want to be better than that. So you couldn’t do well or stand out in any way – it was really oppressive.
On how this novel came about: I was a playwright and I wrote for stand-up comics. After one of the shows, someone asked if I would like to write a short story. One of the major repercussions of growing up working class is that you never think you could be a writer. You think you’re stupid so how could you write a book? When these people asked me, I was a writer already for comedians and for plays where you could write and be inarticulate. You can just say funny things, you can use bad grammar and have a limited vocabulary… When they asked me to write a short story, I thought I was never going to be able to because I had no confidence even though I had been up for awards for these comedy shows and plays. I don’t know how to write a sentence that describes anything; I only write dialogue. And so, I said I’ll cheat – I’ll write in the voice of a little boy and he can make loads of mistakes. So the whole book is a monologue of him thinking. That is genuinely why I wrote the initial story [that became this novel].
On the experience of writing a novel derived from personal story: It was quite a traumatic experience writing the book, I’ll be honest… When I was reliving those things I was thinking, I can’t believe I just accepted that as normal, you know? But growing up during The Troubles, we didn’t know any different… When I was writing this, it was just a litany of the most horrible things. I had to rewrite it and remember that each page had to have laughter and love. It really is funny, the book. It sounds depressing but there are a lot of jokes in it.
On the protagonist Mickey Donnelly: I think he’s an absolute hero because when everyone’s telling you you’re wrong but you know you’re right, you put up with all sorts of abuse because you know in your heart that you’re right. He protects his family – he makes massive sacrifices to protect his mother and his little sister. He does things that are going to affect him for the rest of his life but he has no idea. He will go through all that torture because he refuses to be cruel and he refuses to be nasty and harsh. There’s another way, there’s love… he’s gonna take on The Troubles, he’s going to take on Ardoyne and the way people behave, and he’s going to say, ‘You’re the one that’s going to change’.
On modelling Mickey’s mother after fierce and courageous women: My mom was fierce. It was women who ended The Troubles. it was women that got Catholics the vote. Everyone thinks The Troubles started because the IRA started shooting and bombing people. The Troubles started because of the right to vote [Catholics didn’t have the right to vote at the time]. It was started by a 16-year-old girl who got a march going from Belfast to Derry for the right to vote, housing and the right to get a job. It was a human rights march, happening at the same time for black people in America. It was women who did it… They would take on the world to protect you.
Signed copies of The Good Son is available in-store and online, while stocks last!
