Buy 2 books to get a Super Sing League pouch and bookmarks! To save your time, we have picked and matched 10 pairs of SingLit titles for you.
Beauty Queens of Bishan + It Happened on Scrabble Sunday
A light-hearted story, Beauty Queens of Bishan centers around stereotypical rich Indian families in Singapore, yet it does not leave out other parts of the community and how they all come together in the beauty parlours of the average-class heartland of Bishan.
In Bishan, the busiest suburb of Singapore, thirteen small beauty parlours co-exist quietly, offering haircuts, bikini waxes and facials at no-nonsense prices. All that changes when a swanky new salon opens. D’Asthetique (Beauty is Skin Deep) is run by April Chua, the stylist to the stars. April’s plan for Bishan includes controlling her competitors through a new society, NAILSO (Neighbourhood Alliance of Independent Lifestyle Service Operators). The only person who dares to protest is the chubby Gurpreet Kaur, owner of Monty Beauty Spa. Both have clients in the upcoming Grand Glam Singapore Beauty contest. Will April’s shoe-in Candy Kang prove yet again why she is Singapore’s sweetheart? Or will Gurpreet’s client, Tara Chopra, prove a star on stage as well as in court? A late-night call leads Uday Aurora to find Lavinia, his beloved daughter, about to meet a gruesome end. Uday wants justice. His son demands vengeance. While the comatose Lavinia's condition deteriorates, Uday learns the identity of the real culprit.Distraught and outraged, Uday must choose between justice and vengeance.
What will it take for a supremely decent man to abandon his characteristic morality to protect his family while avenging the brutality against his daughter? Especially when money buys nearly everything. Even absolution The Woman who turned into a Vending Machine + Gaze Back
A housewife turns into a vending machine. Zombies are coming for tea. An unnamed narrator dreams of a cat. The Woman Who Turned Into A Vending Machine is a book on metamorphosis - metaphorical and physical, calculated and involuntary.
Here is an invitation to explore how myth fits with the mundane, and how we shapeshift alongside our endlessly changing environments, muddying along life as best as we can. What do we expect of an author who is unapologetically female? What do we expect of consuming art in general? Should a work be easy, should a work be safe?
Marylyn Tan’s debut volume, GAZE BACK, complicates ideas of femininity, queerness, and the occult. The feminine grotesque subverts the restrictions placed upon the feminine body to be attractive and its subjection to notions of the ideal. The occultic counterpoint to organised religion, then, becomes a way toward techniques of empowering the marginalised. GAZE BACK, ultimately, is an instruction book, a grimoire, a call to insurrection—to wrest power back from the social structures that serve to restrict, control and distribute it amongst those few privileged above the disenfranchised. |
I want to go Home + This Side of Heaven
On the 11th of March, 2011, Yasuo Takamatsu lost his wife to the tsunami during the Great East Japan earthquake. Since that fateful day, he has been diving in the sea every week in search for her.
Compelled and inspired to share his story, I Want To Go Home is a journey from Singapore to Onagawa through the lens of the intrigued to meet him. Of unlikely friendships across borders and languages; to share a man’s loss, recovery and determination to reunite with his wife. The novel's feature film (also titled I Want To Go Home) has also been selected for the 2017 부산국제영화제 Busan International Film Festival (BIFF). This book also includes a Japanese translation by Miki Hawkinson. A comedian, a nun, a reality TV star and countless others meet in a garden. This is not the start of a joke, but the beginnings of a parable. Self-justifications ensue, as well as rationalisations for what these characters are doing here. These denizens might be running out of time, while there is all the time in their Kafkaesque world, and an orchestra is playing a song nobody else may hear.
One Fierce Hour + Regrettable Things that Happened Yesterday
One Fierce Hour is Alfian Sa’at’s first and breakout work. It was hailed as ‘truly a landmark’ for Singaporean poetry when it was published in 1998 when the poet was just 21 years old. Since, then it has been kept in print and has entered the list of canonical anthologies of Singapore literature.
The collection contains the anti-anthem “Singapore You Are Not My Country” written well before social media gave voice to dissent and different views of Singapore. Alfian remains an intelligent writer with an unabashedly social and political voice. He has written 37 plays, 3 works of prose and 2 poetry anthologies A teenager discovers his grandfather's secret identity only after his death. A young immigrant to 1940s Singapore is convinced the end-times are nigh. A man is tasked with bringing the corpse of his estranged brother home from Phuket. A reporter is torn between doing her a job and respecting her friend’s privacy. From obituaries and job ads to crime reports and horoscopes,
Regrettable Things That Happened Yesterday is a collection of ten short stories connected by the motif of newspapers, and the unexpected ways they end up affecting our lives. |
Lion City + A Tree to take us up to the Sky
A man learns that all the animals at the Zoo are robots. A secret terminal in Changi Airport caters to the gods. A prince falls in love with a crocodile. A concubine is lost in time. The island of Singapore disappears.
These are the exquisitely strange tales of Lion City, the first collection of short fiction by award-winning poet and playwright Ng Yi-Sheng. Infused with myth, magical realism and contemporary sci-fi, each of these tales invites the reader to see this city-state in a new and darkly fabulous light. Kueny isn’t much of a worrier, except maybe when it comes to her father, the Custodian of a Thousand Generations, whose soul is hanging by a thread. But when her brother, Ah Ti, inherits the throne and smashes the Watercress Elixir that preserves her family’s heavenly reign, her worries take on a whole new dimension.
Left with no choice, the siblings set out in search of a new home, embarking on a perilous journey that takes them through 14th century Majapahit and 19th century Malaya, where they encounter a dreamy prince who promises them the world, and end up in a sparkling city that will consume everything they know. A mix of mythology, history and adventure—think Journey to the West meets Huckleberry Finn—Ah Ti and Kueny’s story is about growing up and finding a place for oneself in the world. It is also a story of Singapore, different from the one commonly told—an attempt to capture a sense of the fullness of time contained in the land and its people. The Impermanence of Lilies + The Loving and the Dead
The captain of the Titanic went down with his ship on 15 April, 1912. But thoughts have power, and those who endure in the stories of the living are said to continue to roam the world after their deaths. And so the captain wanders in search of the things he tried to find in life, and discovers his destiny intimately entwined with a painter who shares the same fate, not knowing that their paths had crossed a long time ago.
The Impermanence of Lilies is a melancholic tribute to the nature of life and a yearning for love, in a story that reaches across lifetimes, borders, and the space between two hearts. Catherine Lim’s free-wheeling imagination cheerfully dispenses with all constraints to tell stories of that other world. Written with an exaggerated sense of earnestness and caution, the eighteen tales in this collection elicit in the reader the very goosebumps of terror she had herself experienced as a child listening to such tales.
As an adult, these goosebumps persist for her. However, they no longer arise from fear, but from a sense of awe and mystery that she feels when she considers this large existential question: Despite our extensive scientific knowledge today, what do we know of the supernatural? What can we know of the supernatural? |
Land of Meat Munchers + Harris Bin Potter & The Stoned Philsopher
Life in the HDB heartlands of Singapore can be a real bitch. Especially when everyone out there wants to eat your flesh.
It's 28 days - or at least we think it's 28 - after the zombie apocalypse. This is Jim: Ghim Moh resident, undergraduate and apocalypse survivor. Sanctuary is waiting in that hipster district they call Tiong Bahru, but there are are five million very hungry meat munchers in the way. And all he's got to fend them off is his parang (machete) and a backpack. Sure, there's Selina the crazy girl with the tattos and Raj the law graduate to help out. But it doesn't mean they cant get infected. Welcome to the brand new city state of Singapore, where meat munchers and wayangs roam the land, and you'd better have a weapon ready. After all, when there's no more government to complain to, survival is your own problem. An illustrated edition of the author’s first novel—the hilarious, viral hit Harris bin Potter and the Stoned Philosopher, in which a bespectacled boy finds out that magic is disappearing in Singapore... and has to stop it.
Harris bin Potter is an orphan who loves to play void deck football like any other Singaporean boy. But when he discovers he is a parceltongue (i.e., he can talk to boxes...er, parcels), his world changes. Harris learns about his magical lineage and enrols at the MOE-approved Hog-Tak-Halal-What School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. There, he is sorted into the House of Fandi and gets caught up in an insane adventure to save Singapore’s magical folk from being turned into kosongs. The Wayang at Eight Milestones + Ah...The Fragrance of Durians
This long overdue collection gathers together sixteen of Gregory Nalpon’s short stories, eleven of his essays, and a selection of his sketches of life in coffee shops, hawker stalls and samshu shops. Through his writing, Nalpon poignantly records a lost, rich world: the colourful, exciting and sometimes perilous Singapore of half a century ago.
With this collection, a vital Singaporean voice is finally recovered. Nalpon’s inspired blend of close observation, legend, local superstition and peculiarly eclectic reading results in some of the most imaginative and exciting writing produced in Singapore during the 1960s and 1970s, including authentic descriptions of indigenous culture and working-class men and women rarely found in Singaporean writing of the period. The title of the collection was inspired by an ‘Eight Milestone’ at Seletar Road, Changi Road and Bukit Timah, located eight miles from the Singapore city centre. “...if you had done it alone, it might not have been that serious. But still, skinny-dipping is taboo in our society. For Christ’s sake, do it in the privacy of your bathroom if you want to expose yourself.”
Is there really an acceptable code of behaviour by which we judge others? In this collection of distinctively Singaporean short stories we meet people we know and think we understand, but do we really? • Ah... the Fragrance of Durians and Other Stories was first published in 1993, and in that same year was awarded the Publishers Prize for fiction. The stories – filled with life’s many ironies – are told with remarkable credibility because they are about people whom we know too well or think we know in our very own real life experiences. Beneath the simplicity of the stories are the varied themes presented by the human psyche – themes that tell of a suppressed consciousness that often we are reluctant to acknowledge, and one that compels us, sometimes frighteningly, to confront the true meaning of life. |
The New Singapore Horror Collection + Singapore Noir
Tales of horror have long been an integral part of Singapore’s storytelling culture, and they continue to dominate the imagination in the 21st century. But even as the horror folklore of yesteryear—along with its creatures, the pontianak and the jiangshi—recedes from collective memory, new fears have risen to take its place.
Horror strikes deepest when it hits close to home. This collection aims to uncover the secret fears that lurk within the Singapore psyche, the unspoken fears often obscured by the lights and hubbub of modern city living. Whether it is the unknown skulking out there in the shadows or the existential angst that no amount of modernity can help shake off, we remain very much captive to the dark creatures that unceasingly stalk our minds. The 13 stories in this collection explores our discomfiture, our unease about the things we cannot see, understand or hope to easily overcome. Sometimes they are the things that threaten our humanity; yet at other times nothing appears to be of a greater threat to humankind than our very own humanity. Beneath Singapore’s sparkling veneer is a country teeming with shadows. Explore the city-state’s forgotten back alleys, red-light districts, kelongs and gambling dens with 14 illustrious writers, three of them Singapore Literature Prize winners. This exciting anthology — compiled by US-based Singaporean author Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan and part of the award-winning Noir series developed by Akashic Books in New York — promises to uncover a side of Singapore rarely explored in literature.
The Light that Find Us + Impractical Uses of Cake
Deepavali has never been the same since the terrible mistake Shreya made three years ago. She now dreads the annual celebration, choosing instead to be as uninvolved as possible, until she is visited by three celestial beings who decide to help her right the wrongs.
In Singapore’s answer to A Christmas Carol, Shreya revisits key events in her family’s history and catches a glimpse of their future as well. Seeing things in a new light, she comes to terms with her emotional wounds and learns the importance of keeping herself and her family whole. 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. |