Six Degrees of Expatriation: Uncovering the Lives of Expats in Singapore
Maida Pineda
Singapore: Marshall Cavendish, 2009
ISBN: 9789814276672

What begins as an innocent food trip to partake of roti pratas, Hainanese Chicken Rice, and Oyster Omelettes turns into a life changing decision. International food and travel writer Maida Pineda captures the thrills, quirks, and adjustments of her big move to Singapore. Her candid and honest essays cover everything from the inescapable conversations with cab drivers, to finding a place to rent, and even the art of saving a seat in hawker centres. Through her everyday adventures in this small island, she encounters a diverse mix of expatriates including a photographer, a linguist who speaks eight languages, and a meditation teacher coming from all over the world. She tells the story of their lives in this compact country, closely interconnected, where everyone seems to be linked in a mere two degrees of separation.

Different Voices: The Singaporean/Malaysian Novel
Rosaly Puthucheary
Singapore: ISEAS, 2009
ISBN: 9789812309112 / 9789812309105

Different Voices: Singaporean/Malaysian Novel focuses on the challenges that face a novelist in the literary representation of a multilingual environment. The early writers used strategies like vernacular transcription and mimetic translation. However, the close readings of twelve selected novels by non-European writers from 1980 to 2001 indicate the increasing use of strategies like lexical borrowings, code mixing, code switching and varieties of Singapore-Malayan English, instead. Puthucheary asserts in her book that the methods of language appropriation have a direct connection to how the writer conveys the multilingual nature of the Singapore-Malayan society through the speaking person while developing the central theme of the novel. The book maps out the verbal artistic representation of the speaking person and the correlation between speech and character in a multilingual environment.

Sudden in Youth: New and Selected Poems
Felix Cheong
Singapore: Ethos Books, 2009
ISBN: 9789810834128

Out of the mundane, a flash of lyrical. From the profane, a hint of sublime. And always, the inventive wordplay that cuts through the skin of language.

Sucking up the marrow of his life, from crisis of faith to divorce, from fatherhood to being, yes, tattooed. Voices of killers and prostitutes. Sudden in Youth: New and Selected Poems brings together the best of ten years of Felix Cheong's poetry, as well as his recent writings. Poems at once intensely personal and universal about love. God and things that matter to he heart.

Singapore: A Biography

Mark Ravinder Frost & Yu-Mei Balasingamchow

Singapore: Editions Didier Millet, 2009
ISBN: 9789814217620

Singapore was not always the orderly and successful city-state that it appears to be now. Over the last seven centuries, the island has undergone several changes of identity. In this entertaining and wide-ranging account, drawn from research undertaken in collaboration with the National Museum of Singapore, Mark Ravinder Frost and Yu-Mei Balasingamchow present Singapore's mercurial lifestory as experienced by the people who participated in it. Singapore: A Biography brings together a Ming-dynasty travelogue, 19th-century memoirs and correspondence, modern oral histories and even radio and television broadcasts to reconnect a contemporary audience with the Singapore story.

While famous names from Singapore's past take their place, this new story also introduces a cast of lesser known, though no less compelling, historical personalities - from dissenting poets and radical ideologues, to patriotic factory workers and early feminists. The portrait of Singapore that emerges is dashing, lively and multi-layered, and it offers fresh insight into the ruptures and continuities that have made Singaporeans and their nation what they are today.

Run For Your Life!: The Complete Marathon Guide
Ben Tan
Singapore: Marshall Cavendish, 2009
ISBN: 9789812617811

Fast track your running experience with this comprehensive guide by one of Singapore's most experienced athletes, Dr Ben Tan, a three-time Sportsman of the Year and sub-3 hour marathoner.

Both novice and seasoned runners will benefit immensely from Dr Ben Tan's personal and professional experience as a world-class athlete and a sports physician, as well as tips from the best of Singapore's sporting community. Understand the inner workings of a runner's body and learn how to improve your running technique and economy, meet your nutritional needs, optimise your training plan, strategise for races, and avoid and manage injuries. Wherever you are as a runner, this book is the running start you need to take you from simple running to training for a marathon.

Secrets of Food Millionaires: How You Can Churn Millions in Asia's F&B Industry
Phua Wen Yi
Singapore: Rank Books, 2009
ISBN: 9789810820022

The food and beverage industry is ever competitive and saturated. What makes one F&B concept flop and another churn out millions in revenue? Secrets of Food Millionaires takes away some of the mystery behind the scenes. Within this book lie many secrets for you to uncover, to help you forge your way toward becoming a food millionaire.

Secrets of Food Millionaires is the first book to feature detailed insider stories of established Singapore-grown F&B service companies. Learn about the trials and triumphs of seven food millionaire companies that have made their mark in Singapore and elsewhere: Bakerzin, Crystal Jade Culinary Concepts Holdings, Esmirada Group of Restaurants, Jollibean Foods, Michlangelo's Group of Restaurants, Purple Sage, and Waraku Holdings. Each featured company, with their varied concepts, offers different insights into the world of F&B. Discover how certain founders fought past failures and challenges, to grow from previous obscurity to eventual success. By learning from these real life examples and absorbing the tips provided within, you will gain greater awareness of various invaluable F&B business practices. Secrets of Food Millionaires will also guide you in getting in touch with the food around you, to determine which F&B business may be right for you, and discuss how you can come up with new concepts and product ideas. In addition, Secrets of Food Millionaires features a bonus chapter on the Singapore food industry, its growth and trends, and how the government agency, SPRING Singapore, helps spur the growth and development of F&B businesses in Singapore.

Blood Lust
Alex Josey
Singapore: Marshall Cavendish, 2009
ISBN: 9789814276214

The Tenth Man - Gold Bar Trials:
The true story of the murder of a gold merchant and his two employees reads like a fast-paced thriller.

From the sinister excitement of the plotting and the merciless, savage execution of the victims, to the hiding and waiting for eventual retribution, this will prove one gripping read.

The Murder of a Beauty Queen:
This is the story of a man found guilty on circumstantial evidence, of the murder of his beautiful, sensuous, rich and widowed sister-in-law. Not until the condemned man appealed did a witness admit he had committed perjury—given false evidence. Confessing, this was the first time in Malaysia’s legal history that a witness in a murder trial had been convicted and sentenced to long-term imprisonment for perjury.

The accused was finally acquitted. Had he been hung and the perjurer exposed later, this perjurer would most likely have been hung in accordance to the law that demands a life for a life in these circumstances. With carnal and carnage in flux, this is a trial not to be missed.

Cold-Blooded Murders
Alex Josey
Singapore: Marshall Cavendish, 2009
ISBN: 9789812618924

The Trials of Sunny Ang:
Bankrupt and desperate for money, a brilliant psychopath planned the perfect crime. Sunny Ang selected his victim with care. Jenny was a young divorced bar girl with little schooling, flattered that an educated, charming man should notice her. He seduced her and promised marriage. He also insured Jenny's life for a million dollars; the sum would go to his mother if she died an accidental death. Then he plotted murder: first, an unsuccessful car accident, and then the fatal scuba diving trip off the dangerous waters of Sisters Islands. Jenny went down and never came up. Only a cut flipper was found.

Without a body, the prosecution had no medical evidence and no witnesses to claim unnatural death. How did the law finally catch up with Ang?

Pulau Senang - The Experiment that Failed:
In 1965, 18 convicted criminals were sent to death fro murder - a haunting testimony to the failure of a bold experiment to reform seasoned criminals in a goal without bars. Right to the end, Daniel Dutton, director of the model penal settlement, could not believe that the men he had befriended and worked so hard to rehabilitate would want to destroy him. Too late he realised the extraordinary hold secret society leaders had over their men.

Pulau Senang reconstructs the events that led to the tragedy and the trial, and throws light on a question that has never been answered satisfactorily: Why did the experiment fail?

Muslims in Singapore: Piety, Politics and Policies
Kamuludeen Mohamed Nasir, Alexius A. Pereira, & Bryan S. Turner
London: Routledge, 2010
ISBN: 9780415560085

This book examines Muslims in Singapore, analyzing their habits, practices and dispositions towards everyday life, and also their role within the broader framework of the secularist Singapore state and the cultural dominance of its Chinese elite, who are predominantly Buddhist and Christian. Singapore has a highly unusual approach to issues of religious diversity and multiculturalism, adopting a policy of deliberately 'managing religions' including Islam in an attempt to achieve orderly and harmonious relations between different racial and religious groups. This has encompassed implicit and explicit policies of containment and 'enclavement' of Muslims, and also the more positive policy of 'upgrading' Muslims through paternalist strategies of education, training and improvement, including the modernization of madrasah education in both content and orienttation. This book examines how this system has operated in practice, and evaluates its successes and failures. In particular, it explores the attitudes and reactions of Muslims themselves across all spheres of everyday life, including dining and maintaining halal-vigilance; education and dress code; and practices of courtship, sex and marriage. It also considers the impact of wider international developments, including 9/11, fear of terrorism and the associated stigmatization of Muslims; and developments within Southeast Asia such as the Jemaah Islamiah terrorist attacks and the Islamization of Malaysia and Indonesia. This study has more general implications for political strategies and public policies in multicultural societies that are deeply divided along ethno-religious lines.

Letters and Books of Sir Stamford Raffles and Lady Raffles: The Tang Holdings Collection
John Bastin
Singapore: Editions Didier Millet, 2009
ISBN: 9789814217682

The letters of Sir Stamford Raffles in the collection of Tang Holdings in Singapore has been transcribed and annotated by the world's foremost expert on Raffles, Dr John Bastin. The letters include personal letters as well as more official letters, such as the never-before-published missive describing the founding of Singapore in 1819. Featuring other artefacts of Raffles and Lady Raffles, such as books, medals and coins, this book is an important work in the study of Raffles, Singapore and the region. The transcribed letters, shown with full-colour photographs of the original documents, are an invaluable source for insight into the life and thoughts of the man considered to be the founder of modern Singapore.

De La Salle Malaysia & Singapore: The Tradition. The Legacy. The Future
Ian Ward, Norma Miraflor, & David Webb
Singapore: Media Masters, 2009
ISBN: 9789834430023

This volume portrays a broad picture of Lasallian history as it have evolved over the past 157 years within the eight major institutions that have been run by the Brothers in the neighbouring territories of Malaysia and Singapore. It brings into contemporary focus a pattern of educational endeavour that has provided untold benefits for both nations through all those years.

The book seeks to examine and record, both dispassionately and objectively, an extremely complex journey. The reality is that the movement launched locally with such zeal and fervour in 1852 by the pioneering Brothers finds itself at a critical crossroad. The world has vastly changed, particularly over the past 50 years. As of June 2009, not a single Lasallian school in either Peninsular Malaysia or Singapore has a la Salle Brother as principal. Meanwhile, the overall number of active teaching Brother across both territories has dwindled to just a handful.

Is there a way forward for a highly distinctive and immensely valuable tradition in local education - one widely recognised as “the Lasallian ethos?” This becomes the underlying theme of the book’s final chapters.