Tag: lit review

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Lit Review: ‘The Scarlet Throne’ by Amy Leow

“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 that The Scarlet Throne is 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.

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Lit Review: ‘Edge’ by Koji Suzuki

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.

Edge is available in-store and online.

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Lit Review: ‘Boys Don’t Fry’ by Kimberly Lee

by Elaine Lau

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 Fry attracted 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 Fry came 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.

Boys Don’t Fry is available in-store and online.

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Lit Review: ‘Falling Animals’ by Sheila Armstrong

by Fong Min Hun

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.

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Lit Review: ‘Marzahn, Mon Amour’ by Katja Oskamp

by Fong Min Hun

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 Amour is 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.

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Lit Review: ‘Days at the Morisaki Bookshop’ by Satoshi Yagisawa

by Fong Min Hun

Elaine and I were in Amsterdam on holiday recently, and made a quick detour to The Hague to see Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and catch the Escher exhibit. On the way back to the train station, we passed a bookshop just down the road from the Central Station with the following message above the entrance:

“Friend, you stand on sacred ground. This is a Bookshop.”

Sadly, we didn’t have time to stop in Boekhandel Douwes, but the message on the transom resonated and amused us, reminding us of the high regard and fierce loyalty that book people develop for their favourite bookshops. As a result of which, a mythology develops over time turning the bookshop into hallowed ground. No surprise, then, that bookshops have long been fertile ground for both speculative and documentary writers. 

A recent entry into this long and storied writing tradition is Satoshi Yagisawa’s Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, a Chiyoda Literature Prize winner translated into English by Eric Ozawa this year. The story revolves around Takako, an erstwhile office worker who is thrown for a loop when she suffers a psychological setback. Out of the blue, Takako’s boyfriend announces to her that he is getting married, but not to her. The news sends Takako into a spiral of depression that subsequently leads her to quit her job and turns her into a shut-in. Takako spends most of her days and nights asleep to keep her emotional pain at bay. Her uncle, Satoru Morisaki, who runs the Morisaki Bookshop in the storied Jimbocho book district, offers to let her live above the bookshop. The offer is made under the guise of helping Takako stretch her savings, but the uncle is clearly more of a meddler than he lets on. 

What happens in Morisaki Bookshop should be obvious by now: Takako, a non-reader, takes up residence on the second floor of the shop to begin her involuntary convalescence. One sleepless night following a confessional with her uncle, she chooses a book—or the more romantic of us might say that the book chose her—to while away the time, but instead finds it unputdownable. The book in question, Until the Death of the Girl by Saisei Murō (untranslated in English), keeps her entranced till dawn. Finishing the book, Takako ignites her love of reading and finds new ways of connecting with her uncle and the people around her. During the course of Morisaki Bookshop, we see Takako discuss Osamu Dazai’s Schoolgirl with a new friend, attend a local book festival with pure glee, and transform herself into a more expressive and connected being. 

The overall plot of Morisaki Bookshop is tropey: the bookshop is a place of succour and books are balms for a bruised soul. There is a daintiness in the story’s execution that one typically finds in Japanese light novels, but Morisaki is hardly the worst perpetrator. What makes Morisaki Bookshop worth reading—and it is—is the whirlwind tour through modern Japanese literature that Yagisawa takes us on, the way his love for Jimbocho and bookshops shine throughout the novel, and, yes, dammit, one does care somewhat about what happens to Takako and her uncle. There is also a second part to the book which sees the return of Satoru’s wife, Momoko, who walked out on him five years ago. 

Morisaki Bookshop is a charming story that book lovers will find endearing despite its flaws. It pays homage to the saving grace of the act of reading and to the places that house its instruments. In Javier Marias’ The Infatuations, Marias has the antagonist, Diaz-Varela, say the following:

It’s a novel, and once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with… 

Book people are interesting for various reasons, but one eccentricity they share is that many of them also tend to enjoy reading about reading: i.e. about books, bookshops, booksellers, libraries, librarians and about other people who enjoy reading. Perhaps it’s because these books communicate to them the possibility of an utter life of bliss, a sacred sanctuary bounded by bookshelves. One can but dream. 

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop is available in-store and online.

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Lit Review: ‘How to Gut a Fish’ by Sheila Armstrong

by Fong Min Hun

Sheila Armstrong’s debut short story collection, How to Gut a Fish, is a poised and masterful blend of the quotidian and the unsettling. The stories showcase an author with an array of writing styles at her disposal, ranging from the slow and lyrical, to the quick and punchy, to the arrhythmic and surreal. These are put to good effect with each story coming off as equally unique and compelling. 

In the title story, we follow the travails of a down-on-his-luck fisherman in the midst of gutting a mackerel while waiting for a late night appointment with clients of questionable disposition. His existential ruminations take him from fish to family, and his poor fortune that has turned him into a pleasure boat operator and potential criminal. Written in the second person, the story feels pregnant with fatalism: “Find a prayer as the little death whispers away across the deck and over your shoulders into the sunset. Look your fish in the eye: they say the last thing a man sees is imprinted on his pupil. You check every catch this way for your reflection, but there is only a dark hole of fright.”

Red Market opens with preparations for a village Christmas fete. It is a communal affair that brings people together for the festive season to barter and sell their artisanal wares. Men and women busy around their booths selling an eclectic mix of goods ranging from used wedding dresses and used cooking utensils to an ancient diving suit. But at the centre of the fete is the star attraction of the auction: a trussed up young girl whose vocal cords have been anesthetised and placed belly down like a Christmas turkey. It’s quite clear why she’s there:

Some stop to admire the girl on the podium. A student nurse fingers a foot-long scar across the girl’s exposed abdomen. Pity, she thinks, the left is usually the stronger. Marci opens her palms in a helpless motion when questioned about the missing kidney; it is difficult to get undamaged goods these days , but the stitches are neat and old.

The story is a horrific one, made all the more so by the nonchalance of those participating in the auction; even the bound girl herself adopts a ‘Well, what are you going to do?’ air in these last few hours of her life. Red Market recalls to mind Shirley Jackson’s equally terrifying and superb The Lottery.

Then there are the quieter stories. Lemons tells the story of a girl’s journey to adulthood in 10 brief pages, but nevertheless succeeds in compressing the pains and challenges of a life in a reflective, melancholic story. Mantis, written as an unbroken stream of consciousness, offers a glimpse into the mind of a man in the grips of a mania as he reckons with regret, death, relationships and parenthood. 

Originally from Sligo but now living in Dublin, Sheila Armstrong sets many of the stories in her home country of Ireland and deftly evokes the landscape to create an extraordinary sense of place and time in her writing. Her keen judgment ensures that her stories, which are relatively short, are sufficiently detailed to be enticing but not so much so as to break the pace of the story. An excellent collection that we highly recommend.

How to Gut A Fish is available in-store and online.

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Lit Review: ‘How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart’ by Florentyna Leow

by Elaine Lau

On a month-long cultural exchange trip to Japan as a teen, Malaysian writer Florentyna Leow fell in love with Japan – so much so that the Petaling Jaya-native went on to study Japanese at university in the UK, and moved to Tokyo when a job opportunity came up. 

Leow jumped at the chance to move to Kyoto when a friend she’d met at university asked if she wanted to work with her and move in as her housemate as well. It was this time of living and working in this storied Japanese city that forms the spine of Leow’s first collection of essays, How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart, put out by independent UK publisher The Emma Press in February.

In an excerpt from the foreword of How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart, Leow writes: “The following pages are a brief record of trying to find a home in Kyoto; a series of sketches, vignettes, and attempts to make sense of all the ways you can love a place. Here’s what I’ve figured out so far: when you try to belong somewhere, your chosen home becomes a reminder of what you stand to lose. It will shape you, make you, break you. To love a place is to love its people, and to love a place is to let it break your heart.”

A slim volume of 12 essays, the intimate book tells the stories of the people, places, and food that have left an indelible mark on Leow. She also reflects on friendship, belonging, and unexpectedly, tour-guiding, a side gig Leow picked up during her time there. 

I was drawn in to Leow’s stories by her poignant, expressive writing.  Pieces on specific streets and places, namely her favourite shotengai or shopping street and the jazz kissa she frequents, are vivid and charming. But there is, nonetheless, a thread of melancholy that darts in and out of the book as she reflects on the painful demise of a friendship. “I often joke that writing the book was like five years of therapy condensed into a month,” says Leow in an email interview with Lit Books. 

Most of Leow’s professional writing encompasses food and drink (she’s written for Gastro Obscura and Japan Times, among others), and there is of course, a sprinkling of that in her book, where she waxes lyrical about persimmons and tea rituals, kakigori and eggs. She credits a food memoir she read when she was 13 as the catalyst. Titled Candyfreak by Steve Almond, it’s “a semi-journalistic memoir centred around a candy/chocolate obsession and visiting small candy factories across the US”, she says. 

“Before reading Candyfreak, I had no idea you could write about food, much less write about food like that – describing how it was made, how this guy ate it, how he felt about it – and the sheer granularity of food images you could conjure through sentences. I read that book obsessively,” she adds. “I learned how to use words like ‘exude’ (as in, the dark chocolate coating of a limited KitKat Dark exudes a puddinglike creaminess) and ‘gnash’ (as in, the sweet gnash of hickeys) and ‘tchotchkes’ (as in, a bank of shelves packed to overflowing with candy tchotchkes)… I still read it at least once a year.”

How this book of essays came to be published is straightforward enough. Leow says she sent in a proposal to The Emma Press’ call for submissions and a few months later, received an email asking to see the manuscript. “I was beset with sudden exhilaration and horror at having to deliver a manuscript which was at the time 10% complete at most,” she recalls.

Does she have a favourite from the collection? Leow says, “Not especially, as they represent various aspects of my life and work, but Rainy Day in Kyoto comes quite close as it explores a friendship I cared deeply about. I’m also quite fond of A Bowl of Tea, which is perhaps the most “Kyoto” piece in the collection, as well as the most uplifting and celebratory, tonally speaking.”

Residing in a smaller city with a less frenetic pace of life than Tokyo enabled Leow to become more observant of life in general. She says, “Living in Kyoto really taught me the value of slowing down and looking closely at my surroundings. And also remaining curious. I don’t always remember this in Tokyo — life here is frenetic at times and I am a total workaholic and homebody — but it is always worth going for a walk and letting the world surprise you… I never used to like plants, nature, or the outdoors. Living in Kyoto for a few years definitely changed that.”

Old cities fill us with a sense of wonder and reverence because they are often more than just a collection of people and places. They have a mood, a rhythm, a pulse, a personality; they breathe through you, and you, in turn, find yourself changed and moved by the city. How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart captures some of those elements on the page.

Pick up a copy of How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart in-store and online.

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Lit Review: ‘Birnam Wood’ by Eleanor Catton

by Elaine Lau

Ten years after The Luminaries catapulted her to literary stardom, Man Booker prize-winning New Zealand author Eleanor Catton returns with Birnam Wood, a literary contemporary thriller that’s intelligent and zeitgeisty, but also incredibly gripping and entertaining.

Birnam Wood has it all – a cast of well-formed characters, a pacey, compelling plot, and writing that’s full of verve. The story is set in present-day New Zealand, and the Shakespeare-inspired moniker is the name of a guerilla gardening collective headed by Mira Bunting and her sensible sidekick, Shelley Noakes. The activist group grows food on unused land using scavenged materials, and what they don’t consume they sell. But five years on, the collective is still far from being financially self-sufficient.

When earthquakes trigger a landslide at the Korowai National Park, local entrepreneur Sir Owen Darvish and his wife Jill are forced to temporarily vacate their nearby farm. For Mira, the landslide is an opportunity, and she heads down to check out the place as a potential planting site. While there, Mira is caught unawares by mysterious tech mogul Robert Lemoine who tells her that he has secretly purchased the property from the Darvishes, and plans to build a doomsday bunker on the land. Intrigued by Mira and her efforts, the American billionaire unexpectedly offers to contribute $100,000 to Birnam Wood while also allowing them to cultivate the land. However, when Mira’s former flame and aspiring journalist Tony Gallo hears about this arrangement, he becomes immediately suspicious of Lemoine’s motives and sets out to investigate.

This satirical, social novel holds a mirror up to society with its examination of several issues including the prioritisation of profits over planet and the corresponding consequences; the prevalence and abuse of tracking technology; and the pervasive obsession with self-mythologising. It is replete with astute observations and wry commentary but stops short of being preachy or didactic. Catton actually draws from real people and events – for instance, Lemoine is partly modelled after billionaire Peter Thiel, whom the New Zealand government granted citizenship after spending a mere 12 days in the country.

But this is also an intimate novel where perspectives alternate between Mira, Shelley, the Darvishes, Lemoine, and Tony. Catton has an uncanny talent for writing interiority, and the result is multi-dimensional characters that practically leap off the page. We discover that, for instance, Mira and Lemoine are actually more alike than would seem. Both are conceited – Mira “was long accustomed to being thought the liveliest and most original thinker of any company in which she found herself”, whereas Lemoine “loved to wonder at his own motivations, to marvel at his own eccentric mind, to evaluate himself in the second person, and then even more deliciously, in the third”. The crusading millennial and the conniving billionaire are equally Machiavellian in their approach to obtaining what they want.

I thoroughly enjoyed this darkly comic novel with its Shakespearean overtones, vivid characters and intricate plotting punctuated by zingy dialogue. I became invested from the get-go and couldn’t wait to find out what happened next as the story built to a heart-thumping crescendo. Catton has written an immersive story that you can really sink your teeth into but that also asks urgent questions about the way we are today.

Birnam Wood is available in-store and online. Special thanks to Meora at Pansing Distribution for the review copy of the book.

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Lit Review: ‘The Appeal’ by Janice Hallett

by Fong Min Hun

I seldom read through a book in one sitting, so I was surprised when I found myself fighting sleep to finish Janice Hallett’s The Appeal, a whodunnit written in the form of a modern epistolary novel. The quick and dirty synopsis: senior barrister Roderick Tanner QC has assigned two law students to review the materials of a done-and-dusted murder case. Tanner believes that the wrong person has been incarcerated, and wants some fresh eyes to review the case ahead of the upcoming appeal to cast new light on the matter. What follows is a series of emails, messages, press cuttings and correspondence from key individuals involved in the case. 

It starts off with the return of Sam and Kel to the UK from Africa—the husband-and-wife duo are nurses who had spent the better part of the last decade working as overseas volunteers. They settle in a small, closed community led by Martin and Grace Hayward, both of whom jointly own the local golf club and chair the local theatre troupe, The Fairway Players. It becomes readily apparent that the troupe plays a central role in the community, and participation in the troupe is a quick way for newcomers to ingratiate themselves with the community. 

Martin Hayward is acknowledged as the alpha of the community and runs his family and the Fairway Players with a firm hand. Things change suddenly when, after the announcement of the new play, Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, Martin announces that his two year-old granddaughter, Poppy, has developed a rare form of brain cancer. Her only hope is an experimental drug being developed in the US which is unavailable through conventional channels, and which will cost £250,000 to obtain through Poppy’s oncologist. But Sam, whose time in Africa has perhaps made her a more worldly person, smells a rat…

It may be difficult to get a firm grip on The Appeal at the start as the entire story is told through the written correspondence of the various characters. However, Hallett’s remarkable ability to get in the head of her characters and channel their quirks and biases through their emails and WhatsApp messages—difficult at the best of times—gives the story greater emotional texture than initially anticipated. Of course, we must also accept that her characters do selectively censor themselves in their correspondence, which raises questions about the reliability of their testimony. And some parts are just irresistibly funny: an exchange between the garrulous, but annoying, Isabel Beck and an uninterested Martin had me bursting out in laughter when Martin responds to Isabel’s novella of an email with a one word reply. 

One thing: the book supposedly gives you enough information to figure out whodunnit before the big reveal at the end. I’m not sure if it does. But then again, I read it in one sitting so I might have been too tired, or just not clever enough, to figure it out. All in all, The Appeal is a gripping read, but perhaps not one for fans of dark Scandinavian detective noirs. 

Get a copy of book here.