Ong Sor Fern’s top reads of 2025: Meihan Boey, Natsuo Kirino and Lev Grossman

It seems apt that for SG60, my top read of the year is a home-grown SingLit book that celebrates Singapore’s place in Nusantara, decolonising the narrative of this little red dot with a generous dose of ghostly hauntings, psychic happenings and regional horrors.

I have been following Meihan Boey’s Miss Cassidy series, published by Epigram Books, as the trilogy snagged two Epigram Books prizes and was shortlisted for another. 

Trilogies are a tricky business, some starting with a bang and sagging noticeably in the middle before ending on a whimper. I am glad to report that

Boey’s final instalment

The Mystical Mister Kay

builds to a satisfyingly complex conclusion. 

I have always believed that folklore, fantasy and science fiction offer some of the most powerful and incisive allegories about society. Look how Aesop’s fables and Grimm’s fairy tales have endured, and haunted, generations of audiences, long before they were even put down on the page. 

Boey’s series plumbs deeply from the rich well of South-east Asian folklore, centring characters that have long been belittled or dismissed as native superstitions. As a reader born in a post-colonial society, raised on European fare and indoctrinated to regard Western narrative tradition as the apex of storytelling, I revelled in Boey’s gleeful, decolonising mash-up of drawing room comedy with post-colonial fiction, Greek and Roman myths with Nusantara lore. 

But what I love most about the world of Miss Cassidy is its unabashed adoration of Singapore’s multicultural practices and diversity. It is easy to become jaded, given the constant harping about Singapore’s melting pot. But the ease with which Boey’s multiracial cast interact, code-switch and care for one another models behaviour I, for one, would like to believe is quintessentially Singaporean. 

My next best read of the year is

Japanese novelist Natsuo Kirino’s masterfully paced Swallows.

The 74-year-old has explored the place and roles of women in Japan’s patriarchal and rigidly structured society for decades. Swallows centres on a couple attempting to have a child through surrogacy. The book offers the detailed psychological portraits Kirino is known for, the delineation of which teases out the ethical, moral and social implications of surrogacy. 

Rounding out the trio is another escapist fantasy –

Bright Sword, American Lev Grossman’s wrist-breaking 674-page reworking of the beloved Arthurian legend.

One cannot get any more colonial than the legend of King Arthur, a fundamental underpinning of British lore, culture and identity. 

Grossman brings to his retelling a contemporary sensibility and a literature geek’s nerdy joy in working in a metaverse of literary references.

Set in a crumbling Camelot that has lost its king, Bright Sword remakes characters in more contemporary guises – a trans man, a Muslim warrior, a feminist witch.

What could have been woke tokenism is instead given ballast and gravity by Grossman’s serious exploration of the themes that also engaged the original Arthurian romances – the nature of leadership, and the sacrifices demanded in the name of duty, honour and loyalty.