FICTION
UNREST
By Yeng Pway Ngon, translated by Jeremy Tiang
Balestier Press/Paperback/220 pages/$26/ City Book Room
This eloquent new English translation revives Cultural Medallion recipient Yeng's metafictional Chinese novel, which follows four leftist teenagers in 1950s Malaya as they protest against colonial rule. Disillusioned and middle-aged in the 1980s, they look back on the detentions without trial, affairs and horrors of the Cultural Revolution that they went through.
THE LAST IMMIGRANT
By Lau Siew Mei
Epigram Books/Paperback/271 pages/$26.64/ Major bookstores
Ismael, a Singaporean immigrant to Australia whose job is to decide if asylum-seekers get to stay in the country, loses his neighbour to suicide, his wife to cancer, his daughter to the United States and his Siamese cat to forces unknown. Lau, the author of acclaimed 2000 novel Playing Madame Mao, takes on Australia's troubled relationship with immigrants through this suburban tale with a tinge of magic realism.
NON-FICTION
THIS IS WHAT INEQUALITY LOOKS LIKE
By Teo You Yenn
Ethos Books/Paperback/285 pages/$25/ Books Kinokuniya
How does poverty occur in Singapore? Teo, a sociologist, confronts tough questions on how poverty and inequality exist and persist in cosmopolitan Singapore in this series of essays, based on her research on the lives of low-income families, and in so doing challenges readers' perspectives about them.
SINGAPORE CHRONICLES: FINANCE; POLICING; SPORTS; URBAN PLANNING; FLORA AND FAUNA
By Ignatius Low; Asad Latif; Godfrey Robert; Heng Chye Kiang and Yeo Su-Jan; Wilson Wong
Straits Times Press/Paperback/96 to 116 pages/$16/ Major bookstores
The latest volumes in this Institute of Policy Studies and Straits Times Press series touch on subjects from the tough laws and strict policing that keep Singapore's crime rate low, to the local evolution of sports from colonial cricket to Joseph Schooling's Olympic triumph.
