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Raffles and the Golden Opportunity

Raffles and the Golden Opportunity
  • Author(s): Victoria Glendinning
  • Location(s): Singapore
  • Genre(s): Biography
  • Era(s): Late 1700s, early 1800s

Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) was the charismatic and persuasive founder of Singapore and Governor of Java. An English adventurer, disobedient employee of the East India Company, utopian imperialist, linguist, zoologist and civil servant, he carved an extraordinary (though brief)...

Railroad of Death

Railroad of Death
  • Author(s): John Coast
  • Location(s): Singapore, Malaysia (Malaya), Thailand
  • Genre(s): Historical, Autobiography/Memoirs
  • Era(s): WW2

A bestseller in 1946, Railroad of Death is the first and best account of forced labour on the Burma Railway. John Coast was a young officer in the Norfolk Regiment who was taken prisoner at the Fall of Singapore...

Rituals of the Dead: An Artifact Mystery

Rituals of the Dead: An Artifact Mystery
  • Author(s): Jennifer S Alderson
  • Location(s): Netherlands, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea
  • Genre(s): Historical, Fiction, Mystery, Thriller
  • Era(s): 1962, 2017

Art, religion, and anthropology collide in Alderson’s latest art mystery thriller, Rituals of the Dead, Book three of the Adventures of Zelda Richardson series. Art history student Zelda Richardson is working at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam on an exhibition...

Ru

Ru
  • Author(s): Kim Thuy
  • Location(s): Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Malaysia (Malaya), Montreal
  • Genre(s): Autobiography/Memoirs, Fiction
  • Era(s): Mid 1970s onwards

Ru: In Vietnamese it means lullaby: in French it is a small stream, but also signifies a flow – of tears, blood, money. Kim Thúy’s Ru is literature at its most crystalline: the flow of a life on the...

Sarong Party Girls: A Novel

Sarong Party Girls: A Novel
  • Author(s): Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan
  • Location(s): Singapore
  • Genre(s): Fiction, Romance
  • Era(s): Contemporary

A sensational and utterly engaging novel—Breakfast at Tiffany’s set in modern Asia—about a young woman’s rise in the glitzy, moneyed city of Singapore, where old traditions clash with heady modern materialism On the edge of twenty-seven, Jazzy hatches a...

Shadows and Wind

Shadows and Wind
  • Author(s): Bob Templer
  • Location(s): Vietnam
  • Genre(s): Nonfiction
  • Era(s): Various; written in late 1900s

For many people, Vietnam remains a war not a country. This text explores the country behind the myths and images, looking at Vietnam’s literature, history, art and architecture, politics, religion and food. The author shows the emerging popular culture...

Siam: Or the Woman Who Shot a Man

Siam: Or the Woman Who Shot a Man
  • Author(s): Lily Tuck
  • Location(s): Bangkok, Thailand
  • Genre(s): Fiction
  • Era(s): 1960s

Set in 1967, ”Siam” follows the fortunes of Claire, a 25-year-old bride from Boston. Blond-haired, blue-eyed, the daughter of a Harvard classics professor, Claire barely knows where Thailand is when she meets James, her husband-to-be. (”It’s pronounced tie not...

Singapore Swing

Singapore Swing
  • Author(s): John Malathronas
  • Location(s): Singapore
  • Genre(s): Travelogue
  • Era(s): Modern

For generations of Britons, Singapore was the international crossroads of the Empire, the ultimate colonial posting, the stimulus for writers such as Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham or Noel Coward. Can today’s hightech 24-hour city with its gleaming skyscrapers and...

Smaller and Smaller Circles

Smaller and Smaller Circles
  • Author(s): F H Batacan
  • Location(s): Quezon City
  • Genre(s): Crime
  • Era(s): Current

In northeast Manila’s Quezon City is a district called Payatas—a 50-acre dump that is home to thousands of people who live off of what they can scavenge there. It is one of the poorest neighborhoods in a city whose...

Smokescreen

Smokescreen
  • Author(s): Khaled Talib
  • Location(s): Argentina, Australia, Indonesia, Israel, Singapore
  • Genre(s): Thriller
  • Era(s): Present

The Plot to Assassinate the Israeli Prime Minister At an ancient café in Cairo, two veteran spies plot a covert mission to resolve — once and for all — the Israeli – Palestinian conflict. The pledge: Israel will make...

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