Clement Yong’s top reads of 2025: Kiran Desai, Rickey Fayne and Wen-yi Lee

SINGAPORE –In a year with new offerings by literary giants – including Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan – and a well-rounded Booker Prize shortlist touted as a return to good old-fashioned literary fiction, it is Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness Of Sonia And Sunny that tops my personal list.

The 2006 Booker Prize winner’s

first novel in 20 years

is full of intelligence supported by precise, organic, easy-flowing prose. Cosmopolitan Sonia and Sunny weft and warp their way around each other as they navigate their lives as third-culture teenagers, global nomads who find themselves at home neither in the West nor back in India.

Desai’s loneliness prism is an interesting one, not least because this is a feeling typically limited to personal sentiment. She has expanded it further to become a political and social condition that anyone who has found himself or herself as a minority in Western countries will find poignant, with a dash of the sadomasochism that is the hallmark of Asian families.

The Booker Prize-shortlisted work’s 700-page heft allows Desai to fill it with all kinds of nuanced observations about race, class and gender – how they intersect in love between couples and how these affect the way they respond to those around them. Journalism and writing are suggested as means for the more privileged to gain an understanding of their countrymen.

Sonia in the book reads Russian author Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and marvels at the millions of observations and moments it had taken to compose it. Desai’s work easily prompts the same wonder.

A book of more fantastical and multigenerational drama I recommend is

West Tennessee author Rickey Fayne’s sparkling debut novel The Devil Three Times.

It is a poetic montage steeped in the over-churched milieu of the black American South, spanning 175 years and eight generations of the Laurent family.

The starting point is enslaved Yetunde from West Dahomey, who begins a relationship with her white captor as she is transported to the United States. She is able to communicate with the dead and births a line of mixed-race descendants who have a penchant for affairs and religion, intermittently visited by the Devil himself – Jesus apparently having entrusted the renegade to free his people in Africa.

The fracturing of a narrative between many viewpoints is now de rigueur, but where The Devil Three Times is most memorable is its complicating of freedom with goodness and the characters’ unwillingness to give up the latter.

Grandfathers tell their grandchildren they can resist paying the Devil the price he exacts on them. Fayne, on his part, tells the story with thumping orality and a hint of cosmic wonder.

In Singapore, Wen-yi Lee’s historical fantasy

When They Burned The Butterfly

is a refreshing addition to the oeuvre, particularly with her creative delving into the history of the 1970s gang wars in Singapore.

As with many genre reads, this has a strong undercurrent of the bildungsroman, but I got a kick out of Lee’s use of tattoos, blood and other old Chinese deity symbols to create magic cults distinctive to each gang. It helps that she is an early adopter of the real-life secret society Red Butterfly. Its all-woman composition has, of late, been gaining interest – with a new international crime drama series about them in the works.

Lee as an intrepid manipulator of set pieces makes this first half of a duology perfect for an adrenaline-fuelled year-end. For the history-minded, its setting of a rapidly shifting Singapore from the perspective of belief – the old gods in desperation turning to the most vulnerable for hard-handed conversion – should make for a lively reimagination of the landscape.