The Song of Silver Frond
Catherine Lim
Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2011
ISBN: 9789814346238

One morning in Singapore, more than fifty years ago, The Venerable One, a wealthy, respected Chinese patriarch, head of a large household of wives, children and grandchildren, takes a walk by a cemetery. There, a young village girl, Silver Frond, is amusing herself with a comic song-and-dance act based on popular gossip - about him. The meeting changes their lives.

With characteristic verve and wit, Catherine Lim traces the path of this unusual couple as they struggle with the often conflicting forces of tradition and love.

The Bondmaid
Catherine Lim
Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2011
ISBN: 9789814346207

This remarkable novel tells the moving story of Han, aged four and the youngest daughter of an impoverished family. Sold as a slave into the House of Wu, she quickly forms a close bond with the young heir, but the idyll of childhood attachment quickly turns into a nightmare of frustrated passion as Han reaches her teens - beautiful, proud and in love with the young master. Her life becomes a struggle against the forces of tradition and tyranny in a world where lustful male relatives use bondmaids for indiscriminate pleasure, visiting monks devise ingenious schemes to combine holy public duty with unbridled private indulgences, and gods and goddesses with careless insouciance, smile to see the human drama unfold.

At once a power study of domestic and sexual slavery and a deeply disturbing and radiantly uplifting story, The Bondmaid captures the special ethos of a wealthy and powerful Chinese household in an era of beauty and brutality and chronicles one love - right to its astonishing climax.

Following the Wrong God Home
Catherine Lim
Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2011
ISBN: 9789814346221

In modern-day Singapore, a young woman is about to break all rules.

Yin Ling - enigmatic, beautiful, and engaged to the wealthy, politically ambitious Vincent Chee - falls clandestinely in love with Ben Gallagher, an outspoken American professor. Ben is equally mesmerised by Yin Ling and the depth of her inner life, which finds expression in secret poems and an unwavering devotion to an old, eccentric family servant, whose obsession it is to return a mysterious statue of her god to his rightful home before she dies.

Beyond the certainty of Ben and Yin Ling's love are a hundred uncertainties that break when heart and head collide: East or West; duty or passion; reality or a dream. And Yin Ling must choose: which god should she follow?

The Teardrop Story Woman
Catherine Lim
Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2011
ISBN: 9789814346214

To be born female is curse enough. To be born female with an unlucky teardrop mole is surely a mark of the gods' displeasure...

Set in Malaya in the turbulent 1950s this powerful story explores love's eternal quest against a dramatic landscape torn apart by terrorist grenades. Beautiful and spirited, Mei Kwei overcomes the misfortunes of her birth and runs from the men she cannot love into the arms of the man she must not love: the Catholic priest Father Francois Martin, a missionary sent to Luping, a small town in Malaya.

In the face of Mei Kwei's passion, Father Martin's commitment to his vocation cracks, and the demands of the flesh and spirit come into fearful collision.

Rebuilding the Ancestral Village: Singaporeans in China
Khun Eng Kuah-Pearce
Singapore: NUS Press, 2011
ISBN: 9789971695255

This work illustrates the relationship between one group of Singaporean Chinese and their ancestral village in Fujian, China. It explores the reasons why the Singaporean Chinese continue to maintain ties with their ancestral village and how they reproduce Chinese culture through ancestor worship and religion in the ancestral village. In some cases, the Singaporeans feel morally obliged to assist in village reconstruction and infrastructure developments such as new roads, bridges, schools and hospitals. Others help with small-scale industrial and retail activities. Meanwhile, officials and villagers in the ancestral home utilize various strategies to encourage the Singaporeans to revisit their ancestral village, sustain heritage ties, and help enhance the moral economy. This ethnographic study examines two geographically distinct groups of Chinese coming together to re-establish their lineage and identity through cultural and economic activities.

Singapore Shifting Boundaries: Social Change in the Early 21st Century
William S.W. Lim, Sharon Siddique & Tan Dan Feng (eds.)
Singapore: Asian Urban Lab, 2011
ISBN: 9789814022743

This book aims to depict the richly textured and nuanced fabric of social life in Singapore in the early 21st century, as Singaporeans live in a blur of shifting boundaries where past, present and future co-exist.

36 commentators, artists and activists of different ages and backgrounds share their views in stimulating and compact pieces that come in a variety of literary forms, including essays, commentaries, reflections, poems, dialogues, novel and script excerpts, blog entries and presentations.

These colourful pieces touch on identity, language, culture, ethnicity, sexuality, politics, memory, religion, geography, arts and activism, painting a picture of the complex and vibrant society that is Singapore today.