My Book of the Year 2024

SUSPECT is pleased to share with you this year’s favourite reads recommended by 28 writers, artists, thinkers, and the Singapore Unbound team. The recommended book does not have to be written by a Singaporean, but if it isn’t, contributors have recommended a second (or third!) title that is by a Singaporean. With that said, our contributors might have chosen to break through national boundaries, as have many of the books they have chosen to recommend – which traverse history, memory, language, and genre.

Our grateful thanks to our contributors! We hope you enjoy reading all the contributions as much as we’ve enjoyed compiling them. Please support independent publishers and booksellers by ordering from them directly. If you believe in intellectual and cultural exchange as we do, please consider making a donation here.

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Ann Ang (literary researcher, editor, and poet)
My Book of the Year is Neverness (Ethos Books, 2024) by Fairoz Ahmad. At a moment when Singapore is still reckoning with its recent history of resettlement from kampongs into high rise public housing, this novel traces the last years of the village of Engku Aman through the perspective of three teenagers: Miriam, Siti and Alif. Though lightly held together by a mystery plot concerning the disappearance of a fourth young person, Alia, it is the novel's refusal of Malay kampong nostalgia, and its overdue homage to a lost generation that found no satisfaction in this new nation of "never good enough" that makes this a must-read. Without righteousness, fragility or rancor, Neverness brings into view the young men who were never drafted into National Service, the malaise of a future curtailed by vocational and factory work, and the quiet hurt of how Malay rock began in such villages, and at Padang Hippie. Those who survive learn to wear such memories lightly, as the years go by.

Anne Lee Tzu Pheng (poet)
One of the books that generated valuable insights into coping with my perplexities is a book on artists and their life in art, by Russ Ramsey, called Rembrandt Is In The Wind (Zondervan Reflective, 2022). In our increasingly violent world where atrocities happening far from our own doorstep still torture our conscience and change the way we look at ourselves, this book’s exploration of the tormenting personal stories of artists, including some of the most celebrated, provide insights into how their art was both a saving grace and an immersion into the troubling truths of human experience. The reader may be perturbed, even shocked, by some of the revelations that not all was beautiful in the lives of these artists; far from it. Yet we see how through their struggles a case is made for art that offers the world simply the beauty we so painfully see as becoming something quite unrecognisable even as we struggle to produce it. Art’s history displays most tellingly the destabilised, frightful, nihilistic tendencies of modern times; but it is also evident that human suffering is the same in any era, and the powerful, identifiable images artists of the 17th to 19th century produced that seem so safe and lovely in our homes already bear the evidence of hidden battles. This book is an energising combination of philosophy, art history, biblical study and analysis of human experience.

The other book produced here in Singapore, which I am certain hardly anyone has read, is an astonishing memoir by home-grown artist, Steiner-trained teacher and social worker (some time in her youth) Anne Siew Kim Lim; titled Seven, a memoir of loss and love (Partridge, 2022). I had a hand in helping to edit this book, a work longer in gestation than its writing because of its very personal, somewhat shocking nature, featuring to a quite large extent her Peranakan family who are still alive. The story begins at the author’s life at age seven, with an unimaginable tragedy, the shocking murder of her mother, whose body she discovers on returning from school. The long journey of navigating the abyss begins with this, and traces with a determined attempt at accurate recall and unrelenting self-scrutiny to attain a personal truth based on but going beyond objective truth. This work demonstrates the life-giving power of artistic creation, in particular, the power of the word. We are given an impressive example of how the struggle for authentic recollection and truth-telling for personal survival in the face of grievous adversity, calls up the redemptive creativity that is in all human beings.

Boedi Widjaja (artist)
The book《不只中国木建筑》作者. 赵广超 [Not Just Chinese Wooden Architecture] (Zhonghua Book Company, 2021) is a fascinating read about Chinese traditional architecture, often considered an esoteric subject. The author, educated in France and with years of experience teaching Eastern and Western art and design in Hong Kong, spent five years crafting 16 essays that look at the spirit and meaning of dwelling through the materiality, design and basic units of the Chinese traditional built form.

The International Left-Hand Calligraphy Association by Tse Hao Guang (Tinfish Press, 2023) is a poetry collection that strikes me as experimental and playful in structure and formatting. The fragmented imagery and dream-like sequences that were written in a controlled looseness draw me to the poems. Intellectually engaging and sensorially immersive, the dynamic energy in Tse’s text paradoxically instills a sense of calm upon finishing each piece.

Dr. Caleb Goh (theatre director and educator)
I must confess that I love a good queer rom-com. After being swept up by the YA romance of Casey McQuiston's Red, White & Royal Blue, I was jonesing for a similar novel to make me swoon once more. Along came Fakes Dates and Mooncakes (Penguin Random House, 2023)! Not only did it match McQuiston's book in queer romantic fantasy, but Singaporean author, Sher Lee, placed the two protagonists in two worlds that I personally hold near and dear to my heart – Singapore and New York! With one character originally from Singapore and the other from New York, Lee managed to bring both locations to vivid life and weave an Asian romance that was unique, swoon-worthy, easily digestible, and endearingly told. After the socio-political tumult of the last few years, a good rom-com novel was just what I needed to transport me to a fantasy world that promised a touch of whimsy, a sprinkling of joy, and even a dash of hope for a more ideal tomorrow.

Cyril Wong (poet and fictionist)
Be Your Own Bae by Daryl Qilin Yam (Epigram Books, 2024) illustrates again that the short story is my favourite place to meet this author’s voice whenever he opens up little galaxies in time for whimsy, romantic desire plus a longing for elsewhere to converge through the interconnected lives of transient, often self-absorbed characters stumbling into meaning with, or in spite of, each other. A reprieve in a city founded on panic, outrage and imagined lack, this book about well-travelled protagonists staggering into the bliss of love, before slipping back out again, is an affectionate reminder of the beauty and breathlessness of all our intangible connections.

Daryl Qilin Yam (novelist and editor)
2024 to me was the year of the essay – I can’t quite recall any other year when we’ve fielded such a bumper crop of stellar titles in the genre, including Tania De Rozario’s Dinner on Monster Island, Daryl Li’s The Inventors (OK fine, this came out last year), Max Pasakorn’s A Study in Ourselves (OK, this one also...) and Shze-Hui Tjoa’s The Story Game (which I literally just got my hands on two weeks ago, but have still not read at the time of writing, having chosen to bring Dina Zaman’s Malayland with me to Japan instead)… but the standout title to me would have to be Cher Tan’s Peripathetic: Notes on (un)belonging (New South Press, 2024), an essay collection that is as incisive as it is insightful, bearing teeth that cuts straight to the bone re: why life in the 21st century can feel and think and sound and twist in so many freakish and bizarre ways. In an era of rapid fire questions and hot takes, Peripathetic is testament to why longform cultural criticism will always and forever be that girl.

Daryl Lim Wei Jie (poet, editor, translator)
I chanced upon Natalie Mariko's hate poems (Rile Books, 2024) in Brunswick Bound, a wonderful bookshop in Melbourne, and was blown away by its transgressive, delicious lyric. It asks, and answers, the question of what it means to write poetry in a time where white noise is deafening. "A poem is then a delta in which language pools & then rushes on to the sea". I've also been haunted by the voice of the narrator in Thuân's Chinatown (Tilted Axis Press, 2023), where repetition and refrain are used to astonishing effect. The narrator's mantra-like utterances try to fill the void that's been hollowed out by historical and familial trauma, but they end up reverberating again and again in that hollow, reaching a crescendo of painful, endless echo. Hats off too to translator Nguyễn An Lý, for this virtuoso feat of translation.

Esther Vincent Xue Ming (poet, editor, educator) 
This year and the past year have been years of working through my grief creatively. My dog Ealga passed away in March 2022 from bladder cancer, and after a time of hollowed out loss and sorrow where I was unable to write or create, my womb started to remember and sing again – of love, of mothering, of life, death and rebirth. This alchemy of grief manifested in my poetry book womb song, which is dedicated to Ealga, and all mothers and daughters across kin and kind. In my journey towards healing, two books came to work with me to understand, relate to and transform my grief, loss and sorrow: The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief by Francis Weller (North Atlantic Books, 2015) and Boey Kim Cheng's The Singer (Cordite Publishing Inc., 2022). The former taught me to recognise the five gates of grief in which all individuals must experience during their time on earth, and the ways in which rituals can allow us to tend to our losses, wounds and sorrows so that we are able to meet anything that arrives at our door with courage, compassion and grace. As for Boey Kim Cheng's The Singer, reading it felt to me like a meeting of kindred spirits on a parallel journey of healing and transformation through poetry that sings a way back home into remembering and presence. Kim Cheng's sensitivity to the "ocean stretches of silence", "scent of memory, the echoes of home" attend to the details of a life once lived, resonating with me as someone who has lived and who continues to live "between the living/and the dead".

He Shuming (filmmaker)
Wesley Leon Aroozoo’s The Punkhawala and the Prostitute (Epigram Books, 2021) is an arresting exploration of longing, sacrifice, and the tender humanity that emerges amidst the shadows of history. Set in nineteenth century colonial Singapore, it is both a Japanese and Indian folklore of epic proportions. Aroozoo’s prose is both lyrical and unflinching, crafting a tale that is as heartbreaking as it is hopeful, exploring themes of love, sacrifice, and the quiet dignity of the oppressed. From the oppressive colonial hierarchy to the textures of everyday life, it is a deeply human story that transcends its setting enriched by Aroozoo’s attention to historical detail.

Not quite a memoir and not exactly a diary, The Last Dream, a collection of short stories by celebrated filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar (Penguin Random House, 2023) offers an intimate glimpse into the threads of his life and their connection to his cinematic works. As someone who has long admired Almodóvar’s films, I find these stories fascinating as they provide insight into his creative process. Known for their lush, chaotic melodrama, his films resonate in the tone of these stories – some of which feel like precursors to his iconic works, while others beg to be adapted for the big screen.

Ian Chung (writer and editor)
My books of the year are a pair of short story collections – The Waiting Room by Choo Yi Feng (Epigram Books, 2024) and Be Your Own Bae by Daryl Qilin Yam (Epigram Books, 2024). This is Choo's debut, while Yam has three prior books under his belt, albeit this being his first short story collection. What both books share are their self-assured voices, Choo's collection offering up a diverse array of ecofiction visions that draw on his academic background, Yam's weaving together a cycle of short stories that echo and resonate into more than the sum of their parts. These are vital additions to the body of literature coming out of Singapore.

Jason Soo (filmmaker)
In this year of the live-streamed genocide, many books were published, as if writers all over the world knew that they had a duty to speak out against the ongoing atrocities. Andreas Malm was one of the first to not only refuse to condemn October 7th, but to celebrate it as an act of liberation. For an enslaved population to break down the fences that imprison them in a concentration camp is not only a legitimate act of resistance, but also a duty, and even an act of joy. Hence, we should evaluate this act of liberation differently from the issue of civilian deaths, which is always tragic and deplorable. Malm has several books out this year, including The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth (Verso Books, 2024). I will recommend as well an earlier publication that kept me awake. How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire (Verso Books, 2021) is an urgent and bold challenge to the limits of climate activism.

Jinat Rehana Begum (educator-writer)
As cats get rescued from flooded houses in Malaysia and the waters rise beyond ponding all around us, it feels important to recommend two histories of nonhumans in Singapore. I didn’t anticipate how much I would enjoy Singaporean creatures: Histories of Humans and Other Animals in the Garden City (NUS Press, 2024). I did not pick up this volume of animal histories edited by Timothy Barnard for fun, light reading, but it was – fun. Some of my personal favourites, accounts of – Twiggy, the escaped panther, a starved orangutan falling from a tree in MacRitchie and then rising to fame as Ah Meng the maternal mascot of all zoo animals, macaques killed by mysteriously poisoned bananas and dolphins disappearing en route to Chimelong, China. This is the stuff of fiction, and yet, it is not. Singaporean Creatures is so carefully researched that it documents Burkill, the director of the Singapore Botanical Gardens taking his hatred for monkeys so personally that he compared them with Dickensian characters. It prepared me for Jon Gresham’s Gus: the life and Opinions of the Last Raffles Banded Langur (Epigram Books, 2024). This history written by a wiley Dickensian monkey is fiction and yet feels uncomfortably real.

Jolene Tan (novelist)
Did you know that the total mass of human-made materials on this planet now exceeds that of all the biomass? Or that 5,000 tonnes of earth are moved – "the same weight as ten fully laden Airbus A380 super-jumbos" – to produce one bar of gold? I'm only midway through, but I can say with confidence that my book of the year is Material World by Ed Conway (WH Allen, 2024), an infectiously curious book about six substances deeply yet often invisibly woven into all of our lives (sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium). I was also moved and transported by Radical: A Life of My Own - Xiaolu Guo (Vintage, 2024) recounts urban wanderings, a painful love affair and reflections on cultural alienation with wry originality.

Jonathan Chan (poet, editor, and literary critic)
There have been many terrific books I’ve enjoyed this year. I enjoyed Manisha Anjali’s epic Naag Mountain, which traces the presence of the ‘naag’ across Indian diasporic labour communities from Fiji to Australia, Christian Wiman’s hybrid work of scholarship and poetry Zero at the Bone, and Shivram Gopinath’s Dey, triumphant and destined to become an instant classic, marrying spoken word and page poetry with spectacular wit. That being said, the two books that I would consider my books of the year are Mah Chonggi’s Angel’s Lament (HOMA & Sekey Books, 2024), translated into English from Korean by Youngshil Cho, and 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem by Nam Le (Scribner Australia, 2024). Mah is a Korean poet who has spent his adult life in Ohio, working as a physician while writing poems in Korean. Angel’s Lament reads as a consolidation of memory and experience, examining sensations of exile and the dilemmas of the medical profession, in long, intense, and lyrical poems. Le’s book, by contrast, is his first collection of poems, arriving after a period of seeming silence following his influential short story collection The Boat. 36 Ways explodes on the page, grappling with the plethora of ways that Vietnamese immigrants have featured in the global imagination, ensnared by and resisting old tropes while thinking of ways beyond the strictures of these stereotypes. Both poets, perhaps, share a common interest in the figure of the exile. Their collections are poised to be points of reference for my future writing projects.

Kirsten Han (activist and editor)
Deplorable Conversations with Cats and Other Distractions by Yeoh Jo-Ann (Penguin Random House Southeast Asia, 2024). The premise sounds very whimsical, but as I was reading it, I found it to be such a poignant and gentle examination of grief and finding one’s way. It really drew me in and kept me reading, and reflecting on the grief that I’ve experienced in my own life too.

Lydia Kwa (poet and novelist)
My book of the year pick is Nine Yard Sarees by Prasanthi Ram (Ethos Books, 2023).  This short-story cycle links several generations of women from a Tamil Brahmin family from 1950 to 2019. Beautifully told and complex, these stories charmed and engaged me deeply.

Marc Nair (poet and artist)
Keanu Reeves is a man of diverse interests. And one of which is a 12-issue comic series, BRZRKR, which he successfully funded via Kickstarter. The Book of Elsewhere (Random House UK, 2024) comes from that universe and is a sci-fi/fantasy tale of Unute (clearly Reeves in the Netflix adaptation), an 80,000 year old man/being/god who cannot die. Well, he can die, but he comes back every single time. He was born from lightning and his mother’s desperate prayers. Having lived through the rise and fall of empires, technologies, species and religions, he carries wisdom with the weapon that he is, a berserking rage that annihilates anything in his path.

The novel is co-written with China Miéville, whose diverse range of subject matter in his novels are marked by inventive settings, wild characters and lush prose. What I enjoyed about The Book of Elsewhere is that Miéville’s trademark writing is overlaid by a brooding presence, as Unute/Reeves seems to dog the reader’s consciousness even as they navigate the story, which can be a little confusing, even abstract at times. Ultimately though, as a collaboration, it seems to bring out the best in both authors, although it would be wonderful to see this in a graphic novel form as well.

Meira Chand (novelist)
Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, Stone Yard Devotional (Allen & Unwin, 2023) by Australian writer Charlotte Wood is an extraordinary book. Deceptively restrained, this quiet yet powerfully unforgettable novel examines the nature of forgiveness, guilt and loss. Its shadow remains with me long after the reading is done.

On the Singapore front, I much enjoyed Prasanthi Ram’s debut novel, Nine Yard Sarees (Ethos Books, 2023), winner of the English language category of the 2024 Singapore Literature Prize. These sensitive and insightful interlinked stories examine the changing mores in a modern world on the women of an intergenerational Tamil family. I wait to see what talented Prasanthi Ram will write about next.

Nuraliah Norasid (writer, educator, and happy walker)
Where 2023 was a rough reading year, 2024 is the year where I feel like I am falling in love with reading once more. And for a slow, easily distracted reader, that is saying a lot! Of the books that I have read, three sit particularly close to my heart as these books got me out of the reading slumps that I routinely have as the semester gets more hectic and fired up. I started off my year strong with Prasanthi Ram's short story cycle, Nine Yards Saree (Ethos Books, 2023). I love the closely interconnected stories that feel like episodes of a hard-hitting family drama. Every person in the cycle feels human, with complex inner worlds, dreams and struggles. Closing the year, I thoroughly enjoyed Wen-Yi Lee's The Dark We Know (Zando – Gillian Flynn Books, 2024). When thinking of the world, the word "full-bodied" comes to mind. The underlying mystery is gripping, and identity and relationships are discussed seamlessly within the narrative. Finally, Lystra Rose's The Upwelling (Lothian Children’s Books, 2022) is an eye-opening and thought-provoking insight into the questions of indigenous identity, what life is like, and how the signs of the world are understood before colonisation. Reading Lystra's book made me feel like I am learning language again as the words fall differently, and yet so familiarly, on my tongue.

PJ Thum (historian)
I really enjoyed Nine Yard Sarees by Prasanthi Ram (Ethos Books, 2023) and Catskull by Myle Yan Tay (Ethos Books, 2023) and recommend them both. The future of Singaporean literature is bright!

 If I may be so indulgent, I’d also like to recommend my own work, Nationalism and Decolonisation in Singapore: The Malayan Generation, 1953-63 (Routledge, 2024). I hope it will contribute to a better understanding of our past and present among Singaporeans. The paperback edition comes out on 19 December 2024.

Philip Holden (scholar and writer)
Vestiges: Essays 1945-1946 by Hedwig Aroozo (Word Image, 2024). This is a short and joyful book. Nearly eighty years ago, in a Singapore just emerging from a World War, a young woman wrote a series of essays about things she observed in her life: the shape of clouds, sights on her morning walk to school, her thoughts about decolonization and her hopes for a multicultural future. That young woman would become Hedwig Anuar, Director of Singapore’s National Library, and a key founding member of AWARE, Singapore’s pioneering and influential feminist NGO. Published by her daughter, Shirin, these essays shimmer with hope in the darkness of history, bringing comfort in difficult times.

Prasanthi Ram (writer and editor)
I would like to recommend Rachel Heng's sophomore novel The Great Reclamation (Riverhead Books, 2023), which centres on a young kampung boy, Ah Boon, whose coming-of-age journey parallels the birth of a "beautiful, improbable, unlikely nation" – Singapore. I devoured the description in this book, particularly with respect to the coastal environment that slowly disappears as the decades pass. It's no easy feat to take known history and remake it into a story untold – so major kudos to Heng!

Ng Wei Lin (marketing manager)
Prasanthi Ram’s short story cycle Nine Yard Sarees (Ethos Books, 2023) is an imaginative and well-crafted triumph, exploring how the politics of tradition are contested, subverted and transformed through diaspora. Prasanthi's writing is delectable, navigating characters and passages of complex emotional cadences with beautiful restraint, consistency and precision. The resulting narrative is universal, the women unforgettable. Nine Yard Sarees will leave you wondering about the Srinivasans long after you've put down the book, and your own matrilineage.

Ruby Thiagarajan (writer and editor) 
I spent 2024 thinking about the artist as a body in space – not as intellect or a pair of skilled hands but as someone who needs to be fed, clothed, and housed. Cher Tan’s Peripathetic: Notes on (un)belonging (NewSouth Publishing, 2024) opens with a discussion of ‘meatspace’ and the Internet’s decorporealised promise of fantasy, setting the reader up for the book’s critical conversations about the realities of artistic production in the 21st century. I appreciate how Cher eschews abstraction to focus on granular practical details like how downloading critical theory from file-sharing websites and delivering food for $8 a trip made the work of writing possible. Similarly, I felt the burden of being a body when reading Hai Fan’s Delicious Hunger (Tilted Axis Press, 2024). One story, “Hillside Rain”, describes the Sisyphean tedium of tilling loamy riverbank soil to grow crops, an essential task for the Magong members subsisting on the rainforest. I would not have been able to read Delicious Hunger if not for Jeremy Tiang’s translation from the Chinese, artistic labour for which I am grateful. I must also mention the most important work of art I encountered this year, filmmaker Jason Soo’s Al Awda (2024). The documentary follows an international group of activists on a mission to end the unjust Israeli blockade of Gaza during 2018’s Freedom Flotilla Mission. Jason recounts how he stopped rolling when the Israeli navy boarded Al Awda, assembling the final cut using footage shot by other activists until they were arrested and whatever had not been confiscated. Dr Ang Swee Chai, a Singaporean doctor in exile, was part of the mission and brutalised while in detention. The film is literally about bodies on the line. All three works are by and about people on Singapore’s margins, which is perhaps why their political stakes are so well-articulated.

Yeow Kai Chai (poet)
What is poetry these days? Is it a mastery of form, a deft turn of phrase, or an exciting concept? It’s all these, and maybe none at all. Perhaps the clue lies in that ceaseless search for redemption, a home, where you can be authentically yourself. When the rest of the world, and especially Trumpist America, is in a state of polar extremity, I find refuge in a series of verse collections that prove humanity is still capable of heart and fellowship. I recommend a trio which has surprised me, moved me, and made me see light at the end of the tunnel. The first is Jason Wee’s From A (Undesirable) Diary (Dakota Books/Temporary Press, 2023), an unlikely collage of musings on Malayan laws regarding “undesirable publications,” a fictive construction of an editor/writer/artist’s experiences with various degrees of censorship, and ultimately, poetry’s magical feat of transcendence. The second is Desmond Kon’s Heart Fiat (Poetry Festival Singapore, 2024). To be honest, I didn’t quite know what to expect, but Desmond somehow has done the impossible – serious religious introspection with the panache of avant-garde playfulness. I particularly enjoyed those pieces focused on the donkey – ‘Jerusalem Donkey Waiting for the Shadow of the Cross’ and ‘Mangy Donkey Sestina’ – which somehow remind me of Robert Bresson’s heartbreaking classic film Au hazard Balthazar. The third is Lydia Kwa’s From Time to New (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2024). Again, it’s that mysterious quality that draws me in – Lydia’s empathetic eye is evident in her gleaning a pigeon flying into the side of a moving car, or Ryuichi Sakamoto playing a damaged piano found in the aftermath of a tsunami. All three books confront the world’s imperfections, including their own, and therefore should be cherished.

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From the Singapore Unbound team:

Jack Xi (Poetry Editor, SUSPECT)
Nine Yard Sarees by Prasanthi Ram (Ethos Books, 2023) – Ram's deft characterwork brings a kaleidoscope of experiences into play, turning each character study of Sarees' multigenerational drama into a colorful, moving, and exciting read. I kept trying to put the book down, but it remained stubbornly glued to my hand all day.

Green Frog by Gina Chung (Vintage, 2024) – Weird fiction, sanctimonious church aunties, and a cannibalistic insect woman – what's not to love? Chung's short stories drift between the moody and slow to the cutting and sardonic, perfect for anyone who feels a little less – or more – than human.

Jee Leong Koh (founder and organizer, Singapore Unbound)
The Singapore I Recognise: Essays on home, community and hope, by Kirsten Han (Ethos Books, 2023). Informative, clear-eyed, and nuanced essays about the education of a citizen into an activist. Every Singaporean should read this book.

Sharmini Aphrodite (Editor-in-Chief, SUSPECT)
Amidst a hectic year, my picks are all belated, which is fitting since they have to do with what resists the constraints of time and geography. Vineetha Sinha’s Temple Tracks: Labour, Piety and Railway Construction in Asia (Berghahn Books, 2023) maps faith, desire, migration, landscape, and labour along the length of the Malayan Peninsula. With a focus on the Keretapi Tanah Melayu [National Malayan Railways], Sinha employs a blend of ethnographic methodologies and historical inquiry to ‘track’ how Indian migrant labour both shaped and was shaped by the railway line, culminating in an emotionally dense exploration – shot through with family history – of a past that remains startlingly resonant today in memory, politics, language, belief, and the land. For fiction, a shoutout to Prasanthi Ram’s Nine Yard Sarees (Ethos Books, 2023), which weaves through the complexities of family, belonging, and what it means to make your own way in a deft use of the short story form. Finally, I would like to recommend a book that exemplifies what it means to cross a border, by showing us what remains despite and beyond the existence of one: The Second Link: An Anthology of Malaysian and Singaporean Writing, edited by Daryl Lim Wei Jie, Hamid Roslan, Melizarani T. Selva, and William Tham (Marshall Cavendish, 2023).

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