Annabelle Thong


Book Description




Beng Beng Revolution


Book Description

Beng Hock and his brother, Beng Huat (who prefers to go by Archibald), find themselves navigating a tumultuous Singapore in the near future that has run out of oil and gas. Running afoul of the growing gangs could mean slavery or death, jobs are scarce and food scarcer, and home is a crumbling shanty-town behind the City Hall Steam-Engine Station. And as if these changes aren’t drastic enough, a great power awakens inside Beng Hock, and he must learn how to control it before it destroys everyone and everything in his way.




Nimita's Place


Book Description

It is 1944 in India and Nimita Khosla yearns to attend university to become an engineer, but her parents want a different life for her. As she accepts her fate and marries, religious upheaval is splitting the country and forcing her family to find a new home. In 2014, her granddaughter, molecular biologist Nimita Sachdev, escapes India to run away from the prospect of an arranged marriage. Staking out a future in Singapore, she faces rising anger against immigrants and uncertainty about her new home. Two generations apart, these two women walk divergent paths but face the same quandaries: who are we, and what is home?




Kappa Quartet


Book Description

Kevin is a young man without a soul, holidaying in Tokyo; Mr Five, the enigmatic kappa, is the man he so happens to meet. Little does Kevin know that kappas—the river demons of Japanese folklore—desire nothing more than the souls of other humans. Set between Singapore and Japan, Kappa Quartet is split into eight discrete sections, tracing the rippling effects of this chance encounter across a host of other characters, connected and bound to one another in ways both strange and serendipitous. Together they ask one another: what does it mean to be in possession of something nobody has seen before?




Surrogate Protocol


Book Description

Epigram Books Fiction Prize 2016 Finalist Landon Locke is no ordinary barista. A man of many names and identities, he has lived though many lifetimes, but his memory spans only days. Danger brews as Landon struggles to piece together reality through his fog of amnesia. A mysterious organisation called CODEX bent on hunting him down, a man named John who claims to be a friend, and women from Landon's past who have come back to haunt him. As CODEX closes in, he finds himself increasingly backed into a corner. Battling an unreliable memory, Landon is forced to make a choice: who can he trust?




If It Were Up to Mrs Dada


Book Description

Today is National Day. It is also Cheryl Dada’s birthday. As Elderflower Home prepares for the celebration, Cheryl Dada too gets ready for her party. Between the hours of noon and seven p.m., she encounters the cantankerous residents and caregivers, her mother and people of yesteryears. What unfolds is a story about a woman coming to terms with age, loss and love.




Impractical Uses of Cake


Book Description

Winner of the 2018 Epigram Books Fiction Prize Sukhin is a thirty-five-year-old teacher who lives alone. His life consists of reading, working and visiting his parents’ to rearrange his piles of “collectibles”. He has only one friend, another teacher who has managed to force Sukhin into a friendship by sheer doggedness. While on an errand one afternoon in Chinatown, he encounters a homeless person who recognises him. This chance reunion turns Sukhin’s well-planned life upside down, and the pair learns about love and sacrifice over their shared fondness for cake.




Misdirection


Book Description

The first book in an exciting new YA mystery trilogy about a teenage savant on the trail of her family's killer, from the multi-talented Ning Cai, international magic celebrity and author. When parkour champion Maxine Schooling wakes from a three-year coma, she has no memory of how her parents and little brother were killed the night she was attacked. Using her new-found photographic memory, she covertly helps her hacker BFF with the police investigation of a savage serial killer on the loose. In her race to track down the Singapore Spectre, Max finds herself embroiled in a conspiracy involving stage illusions, a secret exposé, and a controversial megachurch headed by a powerful man. For over a decade, Ning Cai was known as a multi-award-winning stage illusionist and escape artist. After a brief period of retirement, she returned in 2017 as the mentalist Ning: Mind Magic Mistress. Her memoir Who is Magic Babe Ning? was shortlisted for the 2016 Singapore Literature Prize.




Fox Fire Girl


Book Description




The Last Immigrant


Book Description

By the author of Playing Madame Mao, hailed by Time magazine as "one of the best novels ever written about Singapore". Ismael, a transplanted Singaporean, lives on a bucolic suburban Brisbane street. His job is to decide whether asylum-seekers get to stay in the country, a dilemma that never fails to remind him of his own immigrant status. But then his life begins to take on the hue of a nightmare: his neighbour inexplicably commits suicide, his wife dies of cancer, his daughter abandons him for the United States, and his Siamese cat goes missing. In Lau Siew Mei’s new novel, an enclosed Australian neighbourhood becomes a microcosm of a world increasingly hostile towards migrants.