WW2 crime mystery set in Canterbury, Kent (and London)
Ten Great Books set in SINGAPORE
19th June 2025
Ten great books set in Singapore. Despite its small size, Singapore boasts a highly developed, free-market economy with a strong emphasis on technology, manufacturing, and financial services. It’s renowned for its stunning modern architecture, lush green spaces, and diverse multicultural society, influenced by its Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Eurasian communities. English, Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil are all its official languages. It is a great place to visit.
Here are ten great books, of many genres, set in the city.
Forbidden Hill (Singapore Saga: Vol 1) by John D Greenwood
On 6 February 1819, Stamford Raffles, William Farquhar, Temenggong Abdul Rahman and Sultan Hussein signed a treaty that granted the British East India Company the right to establish a trading settlement on the sparsely populated island of Singapore.
“Forbidden Hill” (Singapore Saga, Vol. 1) is a meticulously researched and vividly imagined historical narrative that brings to life the stories of the early European, Malay, Chinese and Indian pioneers – the administrators, merchants, policemen, boatmen, coolies, concubines, slaves and secret society soldiers – whose vision and intrigues drive the rapid expansion of the port city in the early decades of the nineteenth century. While Raffles and Farquhar clash over the administration of the settlement, the Scottish merchant adventurer Ronnie Simpson and Englishwoman Sarah Hemmings find love and redemption as they battle an American duelist and Illanun pirates. As the ghosts of the rajahs of the ancient city of Singapura fade into the shadows of Forbidden Hill, the new settlers forge their linked destinies in the ‘emporium of the Eastern seas’.
The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng
On a quiet moonlit night, Ah Boon, young and terrified, takes his first trip out to sea in his father’s fishing boat – a rite of passage for the boys of the kampong village. As the air hums and the wind howls across the waves, a mysterious, impossible island materialises in the darkness; an island, bountiful with fish, that Ah Boon soon learns only he has the ability to find.
But this is only the beginning of the story, and as Ah Boon grows up, alongside Siok Mei, the spirited girl he has fallen in love with, he finds himself caught in the tragic sweep of Singapore’s history. When the Japanese army invades, the resistance rises, and their small nation hurtles towards rebirth, the kampong and the impossible islands that surround it are thrown into jeopardy, and the two friends must decide who they will become – and what they are willing to give up.
Ponti by Sharlene Teo
2003. Singapore. Friendless and fatherless, sixteen-year-old Szu lives in the shadow of her mother Amisa, once a beautiful actress and now a hack medium performing séances with her sister in a rusty house. When Szu meets the privileged, acid-tongued Circe, they develop an intense friendship which offers Szu an escape from her mother’s alarming solitariness, and Circe a step closer to the fascinating, unknowable Amisa.
Seventeen years later, Circe is struggling through a divorce in fraught and ever-changing Singapore when a project comes up at work: a remake of the cult seventies horror film series ‘Ponti’, the very project that defined Amisa’s short-lived film career. Suddenly Circe is knocked off balance: by memories of the two women she once knew, by guilt, and by a past that threatens her conscience . . .
Told from the perspectives of all three women, Ponti by Sharlene Teo is an exquisite story of friendship and memory spanning decades. Infused with mythology and modernity, with the rich sticky heat of Singapore, it is at once an astounding portrayal of the gaping loneliness of teenagehood, and a vivid exploration of how tragedy can make monsters of us.
Singapore Love Stories by Verena Tay (Editor)
What does it mean to love and be loved in Singapore?
Singapore Love Stories is a vibrant collection of seventeen stories that delves into the diverse love lives of Singapore’s eclectic mix of inhabitants. From the HDB heartlander to the Sentosa millionaire, the privileged expatriate to the migrant worker, the accidental tourist to the reluctant citizen, the characters in this anthology reveal an array of perspectives of love found in the island city-state.
Leading Singaporean and Singapore-based writers explore the best and worst of the human condition called love, including grief, duplicity and revenge, self-love, filial love, homesickness and tragic past relationships. Collectively, the stories in this anthology reveal the many ways in which love can be both a salve and a wound in life.
A Yellow House by Karien Van Ditzhuijzen
Ten-year-old Singaporean Maya is lonely: her grandmother is dead, her mother is focused on her career and her best friend has become a bully. When Aunty M, a domestic worker from Indonesia, joins the family to take care of Maya and her baby sister, Maya is ready to hate her. Aunty M smiles a lot, but says little. However, after Aunty M rescues a fellow maid living in the same building and beaten by her employer, Maya discovers a side of Singapore hitherto unknown to her. She and Aunty M grow closer as they meet more and more women in need. What will happen when Mama finds out about Maya and Aunty M s growing involvement with the aunties? Will Maya lose Aunty M too? After all, Mama did say she hates busybodies … This poignant coming-of-age story, told in the voice of inquisitive Maya, explores the plight of migrant domestic workers in Singapore and the relationships they form with the families they work for.
Finding Maria by Dawn Farnham
In December 1950, the worst riots Singapore has ever seen shut down the town for days, killing 18 people and wounding 173. Racial and religious tension had been simmering for months over the custody battle for wartime waif Maria Hertogh between her Malay Muslim foster mother and her Dutch-Catholic biological parents.
In May 1950, Eurasian Annie Collins, following this case and filled with hope, returns to Singapore seeking her own lost baby Maria. As the time bomb ticks and Annie unravels the threads of her quest into increasingly dangerous territory, she finds strange recollections intruding, ones that have nothing to do with her own memories of her wartime experiences: disturbing visions and dreams which force her to doubt not just her past life, but her whole idea of who she truly is and even to question the search itself.
Finding Maria is at once a mother’s quest for her child, an unravelling mystery and a journey into suppressed memory and the nature of self-delusion.
Sarong Party Girls by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan
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 plan for her and her best girlfriends: Sher, Imo, and Fann. Before the year is out, these Sarong Party Girls will all have spectacular weddings to expat ang moh—caucasian—husbands, with Chanel babies (half-white children—the ultimate status symbol) quickly to follow.
Razor-sharp, spunky, and cheerfully brand-obsessed, Jazzy is a woman who plays to win. As she fervently pursues her quest to find the right husband, this driven yet tenderly vulnerable gold digger reveals the contentious gender politics and class tensions thrumming beneath the shiny exterior of Singapore’s glamorous nightclubs and busy streets, its grubby wet markets and crowded hawker centers. Moving through her colorful, stratified world, she realizes she cannot ignore the troubling incongruity of new money and old-world attitudes that threatens to crush her dreams. Can Jazzy use her cunning and good looks to rise up the ladder in Asia’s international capital?
Vividly told in Singlish—colorful Singaporean English with its distinctive cadence and slang—Sarong Party Girls brilliantly captures the unique voice of this young, striving woman caught between worlds. With remarkable vibrancy and empathy, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan brings not only Jazzy, but her city of Singapore, to dazzling, dizzying life.
Singapore Swing by John Malathronas
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 high standard of living provide a similar kind of inspiration to a visitor? John Malathronas penetrates the Oriental psyche and discovers the hustle among the stuffiness, the thrill behind the Confucian ethic and, ultimately, the joie de vivre in what has been unjustly dismissed as “a shopping mall with UN representation”. Still more importantly, during his quest, he realises that this overcrowded, multicultural, multifaith city-state can teach us a lesson about living together in harmony and with mutual respect.
Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan
Crazy: When Rachel Chu agrees to spend the summer in Singapore with her boyfriend, Nicholas Young, she envisions a humble family home and quality time with the man she might one day marry. What she doesn’t know is that Nick’s family home happens to look like a palace, that she’ll ride in more private planes than cars and that she is about to encounter the strangest, craziest group of people in existence. Rich: Initiated into a world of dynastic splendour beyond imagination, Rachel meets Astrid, the It Girl of Singapore society: Eddie, whose family practically lives in the pages of the Hong Kong socialite magazines: and Eleanor, Nick’s formidable mother, a woman who has very strong feelings about who her son should – and should not – marry. Asians: Uproarious, addictive, and filled with jaw-dropping opulence, Crazy Rich Asians is an insider’s look at the Asian jet set: a perfect depiction of the clash between old money and new money – and a fabulous novel about what it means to be young, in love, and gloriously, crazily rich.
Raffles and the Golden Opportunity by Victoria Glendinning
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) life for himself in South East Asia. The tropical, disease-ridden settings of his story are as dramatic as his own trajectory – an obscure young man with no advantages other than talent and obsessive drive, who changed history by establishing – without authority – on the wretchedly unpromising island of Singapore, a settlement which has become a world city. After a turbulent time in the East Indies, Raffles returned to the UK and turned to his other great interests – botany and zoology. He founded London Zoo in 1826, the year of his death. Raffles remains a controversial figure, and in the first biography for over forty years, Victoria Glendinning charts his prodigious rise within the social and historical contexts of his world. His domestic and personal life was vivid and shot through with tragedy. His own end was sad, though his fame immortal.
Enjoy our ten great books set in Singapore!
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Re Singapore books: You could add to the list with the marvelous Singapore Grip by J.G. Farrell set in the 1930s and then the Japanese Invasion.