2024 Best Reads: Shawn Hoo picks My Roman Year, The End Of August and Delicious Hunger

Top three reads

My Roman Year by Andre Aciman

The sensuousness with which Italian-American writer Andre Aciman renders his adolescent exile in Rome makes My Roman Year one of the most unforgettable memoirs of 2024.

One has to envy the Call Me By Your Name author for his handle on memory and his ability to whip his recollections into resplendent prose.

In his latest, memory is lubricated by the smallest olfactory detail – the smell of home-cooked artichokes or a glass of grapefruit juice. In a time when displacement and rootlessness are motifs of contemporary life, Aciman brings a generous eye to the era’s big themes. 

The End Of August by Yu Miri, translated by Morgan Giles

This dizzying 710-page opera of Korea’s tumultuous political history proves that the novel is still a powerful genre to sift through traumatic histories.

By no means an easy ride, Zainichi Korean writer Yu Miri’s book is, however, the kind which weighs on the mind. Zainichi refers to foreign citizens residing in Japan.

The End Of August, which delves into the politics of the 1940 Tokyo Olympics in colonial Korea, has especial resonance in an Olympics year. In it, a fictional Yu revisits her grandfather as a running prodigy hoping to compete on behalf of the Japanese empire.

But the novel is also marvellously kaleidoscopic — including the perspectives of comfort women, ghosts, mistresses, labourers and revolutionaries.

Delicious Hunger by Hai Fan, translated by Jeremy Tiang

Rarely does a work of Singapore literature manage to render the dense tropical music of the jungle – or as Chinese-language writer Hai Fan puts it, “the rainforest talking in its sleep”.

The former Malayan Communist Party fighter’s short stories are intimate – though not naively sympathetic – sketches of the lives of the guerillas who fought in the rainforests in the last decades of the Cold War.

Booker Prize-longlisted Singaporean translator Jeremy Tiang allows Hai Fan’s gritty surrealism to shine through its dense foliage in his translation. The stories’ keen knowledge of the flora, fauna and geography of Malaya – and their relation to politics – makes this an exceptional instance of Singapore literature.

Disappointment

The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan 

This work of historical fiction about the Japanese Occupation by Malaysian writer Vanessa Chan had made a splash in the West. It was bought for a reported seven-figure deal after an 11-way auction.

But readers familiar with literature that deals with the Japanese empire in Asia will find The Storm We Made historically thin and unhelpfully melodramatic as it rehashes familiar narratives.

The supposed freshness of the perspective might have appealed to the Western market, but less so in Asia.

For Asia-based readers who find this topic well-trodden, read Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-yi’s The Stolen Bicycle (2015), translated by Darryl Sterk. It brings together, with much originality, threads of empire, environment and family through the search for a missing bicycle.