Top Of The Stack: Spellbinding family saga

1 FICTION

MEMORIES OF THE MEMORIES OF THE BLACK ROSE CAT

Veeraporn Nitiprapha's multi-generational saga of a Chinese immigrant family in Thailand unfolds like a rose in bloom - its intricate layers reveal themselves in their own time, overlapping with quiet intent.

Memories Of The Memories Of The Black Rose Cat was well-received in Thailand when it was published. It went on to win the prestigious South-east Asian Writers Award in 2018, and is now available to English readers in an excellent translation by Kong Rithdee.

The story begins in the early decades of the 20th century, when Great-Grandpa Tong arrives in Siam from Guangdong, China, to help his uncle in the rice trade.

He marries Great-Grandma Sa-ngiem, a palace cook, and they have five children together. The narrator tells of the family's trials and tribulations against the turbulent backdrop of the Siamese Revolution of 1932, World War II, various rebellions and coups, and the Vietnam War.

Memory is a slippery, untrustworthy thing, and memories of memories even more so.

Events of the past are loosely framed by Dao, a mysterious boy in an old house who contemplates the memories of Grandma Sri, one of Tong's daughters.

Another shadowy figure is the titular Black Rose Cat, partly named for "the twirl of overlapping patterns on its back, cascading from jet black to the shade of glowing particles of sand, each hue seeping into one another as if painted by watercolours".

This is a fitting analogy for the structure of the book, whose chapters - ringed with foreshadowings - meld like ripples of rain in water.

Memories Of The Memories Of The Black Rose Cat deals in familiar tropes, lending itself easily to comparisons with the work of Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, with its touch of magical realism, and the Chinese classic Dream Of The Red Chamber, another saga about a family and its declining fortunes.

With so many coincidences and tragic twists, there is also a whiff of the lakorn, the Thai television soap opera. Veeraporn sidesteps many of that genre's melodramatic histrionics while - as in her earlier novel The Blind Earthworm In The Labyrinth (2018) - exploiting its addictive potential.

Kong, a Thai film critic known for his columns in the Bangkok Post, renders the original text in natural, supple prose.

The book describes, in moving detail, Great-Grandpa Tong's feelings of being unmoored, yearning for his ancestral homeland while building a life in his adopted country.

It also pays remarkable attention to the backstories of minor characters - from the salt hawker who sold off his son and then spent years looking for him, to the old woman who cares for a man left crippled by wartime bombings.

Veeraporn's book is an atmospheric, spellbinding tapestry of Chinese diaspora life in Thailand, and a poignant depiction of human tragedy in the face of an indifferent universe.

"Just like that?" murmurs one of its characters, her life cut short. Yes - and such is life.

If you like this, read: The Blind Earthworm In The Labyrinth. (River Books, 2018, $19.05, Books Kinokuniya). Veeraporn's earlier novel, also translated by Kong, tells the story of two sisters and a boy in Thailand.

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2 NON-FICTION

HOW TO PREVENT THE NEXT PANDEMIC

"The world has never invested in the tools it needs or properly prepared for a pandemic. It's time we did," writes Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

He lays out what the world should learn from Covid-19 and the steps that can be taken to prevent a similar disaster from happening. One of these involves setting up a pandemic prevention team - Gates calls it Germ, short for Global Epidemic Response and Mobilisation - with about 3,000 full-time staff.

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3 MEMOIR

REBEL: MY ESCAPE FROM SAUDI ARABIA TO FREEDOM

This is the memoir of Saudi Arabian-born woman Rahaf Mohammed, who, in 2019, ran away from her family at the age of 18 when they were vacationing in Kuwait. She fled to Bangkok, barricading herself in an airport hotel room to stop the authorities from sending her home.

She accused her family of being abusive and said her life would be in danger if she were to return. Her pleas on social media received global attention and she was eventually granted asylum in Canada.

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4 FICTION

BUILDING 46

Sam Saadoun, a closeted gay Jewish Arab university student, arrives in Beijing from Los Angeles before the 2008 Olympics. While enrolled in Wei Da university, he learns of a mysterious murder that took place in Building 46, the campus block next to his.

This is the first title in the Ghorba Ghost Story Series by Massoud Hayoun, a journalist who gained plaudits for his 2019 non-fiction debut When We Were Arabs: A Jewish Family's Forgotten History.

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5 FICTION

NIGHTCRAWLING

This devastating debut tells the story of 17-year-old Kiara Johnson, an African-American high-school dropout who enters a life of sex work. Novelist Leila Mottley, 19, was partly inspired by a real-life sex abuse scandal in the police department of Oakland, California, where she lives.

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6 FICTION

THE CHERRY ROBBERS

In 1950s Connecticut, Iris Chapel is the fifth of six sisters. They long to move out of their mansion, but are bound by a family curse that causes them to die one after another. Iris, however, manages to survive - fast forward to 2017 and she is an artist in New Mexico, living under the name of Sylvia Wren.

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7 FICTION

GHOST LOVER: STORIES

American writer Lisa Taddeo, known for her non-fiction debut Three Women (2019) and novel Animal (2021), returns with a collection of stories about modern women and their desires. They range from Ghost Lover, about a woman who set up a message-forwarding dating service, to Forty-Two, which speaks to an obsession with age and ageing.

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8 NON-FICTION

AUTHENTICITY: RECLAIMING REALITY IN A COUNTERFEIT CULTURE

"The best way to understand what is authentic," says researcher Alice Sherwood, "is to look first at what is not."

Across fields from art and fashion to science and commerce, she examines the forces that favour fakery and suggests what can be done to "reclaim" authenticity.

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9 FICTION

I WAS THE PRESIDENT'S MISTRESS!!

This sassy, satirical novel is the "tell-all memoir" of Vita Nova, a Filipino movie star. It consists of transcripts of the interviews that writer Miguel Syjuco ostensibly conducted with Vita and the men in her life - such as a bishop and the president of the Philippines.

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10 FICTION

THE WITCH DOCTOR'S DAUGHTER

Bruneian academic Kathrina Mohd Daud, whose novel The Fisherman King (2020) was shortlisted for the Epigram Books Fiction Prize, returns to the same setting of Brunei's Kampong Ayer (Water Village).

Safiyya has had enough of her parents - charlatans who dispense useless spiritual aid to troubled folk. Before long, she moves out of the water village into a jungle longhouse, picking up traditional medicine and making the acquaintance of a mysterious linguist.