SINGAPORE – In this week’s book box, The Straits Times explores time travel. Buy the books at Amazon. These articles include affiliate links. When you buy through them, we may earn a small commission.
Book review: Lisa Ko’s Memory Piece is a tender, three-part search for meaning
Three lonely girls, three separate social circles, three divergent ambitions. They are brought together by a Fourth of July barbecue in 1983 and a yearning for a greater purpose.
Even as the narrative swells and splinters, following these Asian-American girls as they careen down different paths – to a cemetery, into one temporary home after another, through the turn of the millennium and then four decades into the future – their stories remain threaded together by an enduring childhood bond.
American novelist Lisa Ko’s second novel, Memory Piece, is a time capsule of friendship, romance, queerness, Asian-American identity, gentrification, capitalism, the tech boom and bust.
Book review: Present tense, future proof in Kaliane Bradley’s thriller The Ministry Of Time
What would a Victorian-era polar explorer think of the present day? How would he react to air travel, women’s rights or Spotify?
This is the loose premise of British-Cambodian writer Kaliane Bradley’s extraordinary debut, The Ministry Of Time, yet it is so much more than a fish-out-of-water time-travel tale. It is a gripping, high-octane spy thriller; a dark workplace comedy; a powerful meditation on climate crisis and displacement.
It is also, most importantly, a love story. That it manages to fold so many genres and themes into one smooth package is part of its marvel.
Book review: Joelle Taylor’s The Night Alphabet is a dream-like romp through women’s history
T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize-winning writer Joelle Taylor brings her poetic sensitivity to prose in this ambitious debut novel, a phantasmagoric series of linked stories that weaves a history of women in surreal and gritty detail.
The Night Alphabet has some affinity with her award-winning fourth collection of poems, C+nto & Othered Poems (2021), which explores the private lives of women from the butch counterculture. She blew audiences away in a reading of this searing poem performed at the Singapore Writers Festival in 2022.
Set in Hackney in 2233 in a world where “even the skin is gentrified” and digital tattoos are the norm, a tattoo-covered Jones walks into a retro tattoo parlour with a strange request – and it is not just because she asks for a final inking with a rotary needle rather than laser.
The Straits Times’ Weekly Bestsellers May 4
It Had To Be Her by Anittha Thanabalan tops the children’s bestsellers list.
