Big Mole
Ming Cher
Singapore: Epigram Books, 2015
ISBN: 9789814655354

In the fight for independence, one girl seeks freedom for herself. Born an orphan with an unlucky blemish under her eye, Big Mole is stuck running a fish shop with her roguish boyfriend Hong. When their friend is killed in cold blood on his first day as a secret society gangster, Hong forms a band of brothers and swears ruthless revenge. Big Mole finds herself reeled into a brutal mass murder and tumultuous opposition politics, with the colonial police and local investigators hot on their heels.

This thrilling sequel to the seminal Spider Boys marks Ming Cher's long-awaited return after two decades. Crackling with the seedy spirit of 1950s Singapore, rife with possibilities, Big Mole will transport and invigorate you as, with the tenacity of an exotic fighting fish, one blemish turns to beauty spot.

It Never Rains on National Day: Stories
Jeremy Tiang
Singapore: Epigram Books, 2015
ISBN: 9789814655644

A woman fleeing her previous existence meets a fellow Singaporean on an overnight train in Norway. A foreign worker is decapitated in an HDB building site accident. A Singaporean wife must negotiate Beijing as her British husband awaits a heart transplant. And in different corners of the world, Singaporeans and exiles mark National Day in their own ways.

Jeremy Tiang's debut collection weaves together the lives of its characters across the world—from Switzerland, Norway, Germany, China, Canada, Thailand, New York City and back to Singapore. These wry, unsettling stories ask how we decide where we belong, and what happens to those who don't.

When a Flower Dies
Josephine Chia
Singapore: Ethos Books, 2015
ISBN: 9789810963149

What can we recover after a life passes on? A novel about love, forgetting and remembering. Pansy Lim, a Peranakan girl, was brought up in a seaside village in colonial Singapore in the 1940s. She inherits her mother's love for flowers, nature, the sea, and their healing qualities. Educated by English nuns, she learns and grows to love English, literature and poetry. We see her at the start of the novel, aged, forgetful, and desperately clinging to memories of her recently deceased husband. Through her recollections, she remembers George Chan, the village life that they shared, and the communal past left behind by a nation always on the move.

Cherry Days
David Leo
Singapore: Ethos Books, 2015
ISBN: 9789810964870

A coming-of-age story set in 1950s Singapore, written with photorealistic clarity. Skinny and his friends grow up in a self-sufficient kampong along an unnamed road. Reading about their lives, a distinctive character of their long-gone childhood and of Singapore emerges -- raw from a recently concluded war, alive with student riots and social movements.

Among the themes explored by the narrator is one of change, such as the transition from rural to urban living and the role of women in a developing society, as if inevitably the road must lead to it. Stories of love, death and forgiveness line the unnamed road at the heart of life in the kampong.

The Epigram Books Collection of Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume Two
Jason Erik Lundberg (ed.)
Singapore: Epigram Books, 2015
ISBN: 9789814615921

Singaporean literature has begun experiencing a sea change, with the short story form enjoying a renaissance. As a result, an explosion of short fiction with a Singaporean flavour has been produced to incredible effect, both by emerging and established writers. For the prose enthusiast, it is a very exciting time.

The Epigram Books Collection of Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume Two curates the finest short fiction from Singaporean writers published in 2013 and 2014. This ground-breaking and unique anthology showcases stories that examine various facets of the human condition and the truths that we tell ourselves in order to exist in the everyday. The styles are as varied as the authors, and no two pieces are alike. Here are twenty unique and breathtaking literary insights into the Singaporean psyche, which examine what it means to live in this particular part of the world at this particular time.

The Widower
Mohamed Latiff Mohamed
Singapore: Epigram Books, 2015
ISBN: 9789814615129

Former political detainee and professor Pak Karman loses his wife in a car accident. The intensity of his mourning causes him to become untethered from his sanity. As reality, memory and fantasy become more and more blurred, he must come to terms with his past actions before his grief overwhelms him completely. Mohamed Latiff Mohamed's novel, hailed as a landmark in modernist Malay fiction, is an unsettling tale of psychic disintegration and obsessive love.

Corridor: 12 Short Stories
Alfian Sa'at
Singapore: Ethos Books, 2015
ISBN: 9789810779931

Corridor is a collection of short stories all set in present‐day Singapore. With unsentimental clarity and heartbreaking honesty, Alfian Sa'at writes about HDB dwellers -- students, housewives and factory workers, whose lives begin to unravel once they discover that happiness is a fragile thing in a country obsessed with progress and success.

The characters in each story find themselves in situations that offer them a ticket to hope and change: A video camera transforms the way a resentful daughter sees her widowed mother. A married couple receives free holiday tickets just when their luck seems to have run out. A girl encounters a transvestite on an MRT train ride who tells her that she looks like a famous singer. And a man enters a discotheque after a bitter divorce and re‐learns the terror of falling in love all over again.

Rich in authentic detail, with a sensitive ear for the vernacular, Corridor paints an elegiac, revealing portrait of contemporary Singaporeans who exist along the city's corridors -- haunted by lost loves, irrevocable childhoods and a deep longing to be free.

Corridor won the Singapore Literature Prize Commendation Award in 1998.

Sandstorms and Sorrow
You Jin
Singapore: Epigram Books, 2014
ISBN: 9789814615020

How will a young Singaporean writer with an infant son cope with life in this strange, often hostile, environment, in a time before the Internet and cheap air travel? With her trademark chatty style and wry humour, You Jin chronicles her encounters with viciously bored expat wives, mistreated migrant workers, and foreigners who unwittingly fall foul of draconian local laws, as well as her many misadventures negotiating an unfamiliar culture. What strategies will she need to survive life in the desert?

The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
Walter Woon
Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2014
ISBN: 9789814561020

After the British surrender, life has to go on for the inhabitants of Japanese-occupied Singapore. Dennis Chiang finds himself in the Kempeitai dragnet during the Sook Ching operation but is unexpectedly freed by one Captain Takeda -- whom he thought an innocuous barber but turns out to have been a high-ranking Japanese intelligence officer -- and taken under Akihiko's wing as a writer for a propaganda magazine.

Meanwhile, ghosts from his past reappear. Communist agitator Siew Chin seeks sanctuary with the Chairman of the Malayan Communist Party, while his previous solicitor boss, Clarence d'Almeida poses as a Malay driver and takes a job with Akihiko. Dennis finds himself teetering on the edge of a samurai sword between the devil and the deep blue sea. All while trying to find Daphne, his missing lady-love.

Things come to a head when the Japanese surrender. Dennis finds himself accused of collaboration and is targeted by the Communists. Must he throw in his lot unequivocally with the Japanese to survive?

Part of The Advocate's Devil series, this exciting installment fills the gap between The Devil to Pay and The Devil's Circle.

Ten Things My Father Never Taught Me and Other Stories
Cyril Wong
Singapore: Epigram Books, 2014
ISBN: 9789814615082

A woman learns of a friend's illness and wonders if she ever truly knew him. A boy who sees ghosts heeds the advice of a fortune-teller, with surprising consequences. A girl wakes up and realises everybody in her Bedok neighbourhood has vanished. This collection brings together, for the first time, both new and previously published stories by Cyril Wong, the award-winning author of The Last Lesson of Mrs de Souza. Ranging from the commonplace to the surreal, these short narratives feature characters in crisis, with two stories crossing intriguingly into creative autobiography.

Tales From the ECP: A Collection of Short Stories
Russ Soh
Singapore: Ethos Books, 2014
ISBN: 9789810922702

Acronyms are peculiarly Singaporean -- short forms created to deliver information with optimal efficiency. An acronym very familiar to Singaporeans is ECP. Extending about 20 kilometres or so, the East Coast Parkway is a vital transport channel, running parallel to another ECP for a large part of its length. It is this other ECP that Tales From The ECP celebrates. Featuring incidents set in or around the East Coast Park, the stories take us into the heart of Singaporean-ness.

East Coast Park is the unsung hero in the ten short stories in this collection. As a meeting point, it brings together people of different age, race, class and nationality. Chance encounters lead to consequences that are frequently comic, sometimes unexpected, variously touching and heartwarming. As a point of conversation, the ECP and its surrounds allow characters to reflect deeply on their sense of self, their identity, and their relationships with others who share the same space.

The Space Between the Raindrops
Justin Ker
Singapore: Epigram Books, 2014
ISBN: 9789814615068

Pablo Neruda tries to compose a poem on Isla Negra, as a man considers cheating on his parking coupon at a Maxwell Road car park. A bed thief breaks into a HDB flat every day, only to steal a few hours' rest. Singapore is interviewed as a psychiatric patient on National Day.

Newcomer Justin Ker's imaginative and compelling forays into the field of flash fiction carry on that tradition made so popular in the US over the past three decades, by such luminaries as Joyce Carol Oates, Stuart Dybek and Margaret Atwood. The possibilities in such a short, sharp form are limitless and potentially profound, and Ker reveals his deftness by providing full narratives within only a few pages. Each evanescent story inhabits the fleeting, unrepeatable place between the falling droplets on our island of rain. Perfect for a brief subway ride or the interval spent waiting for the bus, as well as that languid afternoon spent contemplating a thunderstorm, The Space Between the Raindrops is a remarkable collection of short stories told by a startling new voice.

Trivialities About Me and Myself
Yeng Pway Ngon
Singapore: Epigram Books, 2014
ISBN: 9789814615105

The Chinese protagonist of Trivialities about Me and Myself, a journalist turned entrepreneur, possesses a split personality. "Me" is a figure consumed by greed and sexual desire, two impulses that undermine his careers, his two marriages, and his relationship with his son. Throughout the novel he engages in a dialogue with his other identity, the moralistic "Myself", whose principled stances try but usually fail to win over his other half.

The protagonist's lifetime, from childhood to his dying days in a rest home, parallels the modern history of Singapore itself and its evolution from a colonised city to a consumer-oriented nation, one in which an English-language educational system and commercial interests suppress indigenous languages and traditions. While the meticulously described action takes place in the city, the real setting is within the psyche of the narrator, whose two halves are engaged in an epic struggle for dominance.

Singular Acts of Endearment
Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé
Singapore: Squircle Line Press, 2014
ISBN: 9789810913410

This is a story where nothing happens. Think William Gaddis minus the unattributed dialogue. Think Joyce's Ulysses when the citizen's biscuit tin gets hurled through the air. It's dramatic but the act doesn't have a purpose. It doesn't translate. After twenty years abroad, Jasmine Lee-Heschel has returned to Singapore to read literature at college. Jasmine is Jewish-Chinese. He insists on email correspondence, so she pays attention to what he's saying. Ma is a cursory presence, and Prof is an accidental father figure. Uncle Han checks in on Ah Gong, who's dying of cancer. A year to live is the doctor's prognosis. A caretaker at a plant nursery, Ah Gong is bent on building a garden for their HDB flat. To appease him, Jasmine seems tasked to take Ah gong to what small enclaves of nature still exist on the island. There's, of course, a boy. And there's the dead Nina who saw an angel. But everything stands still, like a tree in the middle of pasture. And everything, shifting in and out of perspective, attempts to dip into the eminently unreadable.

Of Robbe-Grillet, Barthes writes: "Description for Robbe-Grillet is always 'anthological' - a matter of presenting the object as if it were in itself a spectacle, permitting it to make demands on our attention without regard for its relation to the dialectic of the story". If Robbe-Grillet's novels are prolonged expositions on the objects around us with no implicit judgement, this story represents an inversion, revelling in a sort of violent catachresis. The metaphors are mixed, heaped in a huge mess. Everything seems at first to have meaning, and meaningful import. A branch, a flower, a kind of leaf, a tree. The epistolary provides the illusion of a continual epiphany, but for Jasmine , the explosive declarations or introspections lead to no real denouement, no real insight to life. At least not for her, when she starkly exposits that "nothing makes sense". Indeed, in the anticipation for death, there is little to no sense. No sense to be made of it at all. And by association, the language, its narrative and all the rest of it.

The Bicycle
Cheah Sinann
Singapore: Epigram Books, 2014
ISBN: 9789814615501

In one of the last remaining jungles in Singapore, an old bicycle is unearthed in an archaeological dig. Its discovery brings the elderly Lim Ah Cheng back to a time when he rode with his life on the line…

Meticulously researched by the creator of Singapore's first daily comic strip The House of Lim, cartoonist Cheah Sinann, The Bicycle tells the tale of Toshiro Iwakura, an aristocratic, battle-hardened private haunted by his desire to cycle in the Olympics, and five-year-old street urchin Ah Cheng, who dreams of nothing more than learning how to ride a bike. Their paths cross during the Japanese Occupation, when a unique bond formed over two wheels is quickly put to a life-or-death test.

Aunty Lee's Deadly Specials
Ovidia Yu
US: William Morrow & Company, 2014
ISBN: 9780062338327

Rosie "Aunty" Lee, the feisty widow and amateur sleuth and proprietor of Singapore's best-loved home-cooking restaurant, is back in another delectable, witty mystery involving scandal and murder among the city's elite.

Few know more about what goes on in Singapore than Aunty Lee. When a scandal over illegal organ donation makes news, she already has a list of suspects. There's no time to snoop, though -- Aunty Lee's Delights is catering a brunch for local socialites Henry and Mabel Sung. Rumor has it that the Sungs' fortune is in trouble, and Aunty Lee wonders if the gossip is true. But soon after arriving at the Sungs', her curiosity turns to suspicion. Why is the guesthouse in the garden locked up--and what's inside? Where is the missing guest of honor? Then Mabel Sung and her son, Leonard, are found dead. The authorities blame it on Aunty Lee's special stewed chicken with buah keluak, a local black nut that can be poisonous if cooked improperly. She's certain the deaths are murder -- and that they're somehow linked to the organ donor scandal. To save her business and her reputation, she's got to prove it -- and unmask a dangerous killer.

When the Goddesses Die
Latha
Singapore: Epigram Books, 2014
ISBN: 9789814615143

No longer silenced, the voices of Tamil women within Singaporean literature are given a powerful outlet by Latha, in her first collection of stories to be translated into English. The old lady forced to move because of an en bloc sale; the socially anxious student unable to leave her rented room because of a funeral in the house; the religious devotee taken over during a spiritual re-enactment; the daughter caring for her terminally ill mother; and the enigmatic Alyssa, who lives with her grandparents on Pulau Ubin as a child, and must deal with incredible physical loss as an adult. Culled from and expanding upon Naan Kolai Seyum Penkal, winner of the Singapore Literature Prize in 2008, When the Goddesses Die entertains and elucidates, covering a broad range of social issues with grace and irreverence.

Here and Beyond: 12 Stories
Cyril Wong (ed.)
Singapore: Ethos Books, 2014
ISBN: 9789810779917

This is an anthology of twelve stories from twelve unique Singaporean voices: S. Rajaratnam, Yeo Wei Wei, Goh Sin Tub, Simon Tay, Stephanie Ye, Alfian Sa’at, Suchen Christine Lim, Wena Poon, O Thiam Chin, ClaireTham, Philip Jeyaretnam and Felix Cheong.

These stories chart the emotional ups and downs of protagonists who strive to find meaning against the backdrop of negotiations between the local and the global, between the past and an ever-changing, urbanised present. Rediscovering the self and the value of relationships form the focus of these tales, which range from the realistic to the surreal, with the occasional epiphany about one’s mortality and the meaning of existence within the bustling city.

Art Studio
Yeng Pway Ngon (translated by Goh Beng Choo & Loh Guan Liang)
Singapore: Math Paper Press, 2014
ISBN: 9789810797508

Singapore, 1980s. Amid the tumult of political promise and upheaval, Yan Pei and his students struggle to pursue art in a rented studio. Yan Pei, a penniless artist, sacrifices more than his marriage to perfect his craft. His student Si Xian makes an irrevocable decision after Ning Fang, the subject of his unrequited love, leaves him for India. Jian Xiong gives up art – and his humanity – when communist politics force him to flee into the Malayan jungle. A story of disparate paths crossing continents over the span of forty years after Singapore's independence, Art Studio is a stirring meditation on art, politics and memory.

Last Train From Tanjong Pagar
Koh Hong Teng
Singapore: Epigram Books, 2014
ISBN: 9789810769192

The Keretapi Tanah Melayu (KTM) train that ran between Singapore and Malaysia for almost 80 years was rerouted to Woodlands Train Checkpoint following the closure of Tanjong Pagar Railway Station -- now a gazetted national monument -- in June 2011.

Based on real tours led by architecture historian Lai Chee Kien, Last Train from Tanjong Pagar follows a group of heritage enthusiasts as they discover Singapore’s railway heritage, and gather with passengers from all walks of life for one final ride out of Tanjong Pagar station.

Seamlessly blending fact and fiction, Koh Hong Teng has produced a timely and thought-provoking graphic homage to our trains and not only the physical journeys but also the human connections they have made possible.