Books from Singapore

Agak Agak is a Singaporean cookbook by Shu Han Lee built around the idea that cooking can stay flexible and personal. The Malay phrase agak agak means to estimate or to judge by eye, and it describes how many home cooks have long worked: adjusting seasonings, swapping ingredients, and trusting instinct rather than strict measurements. Lee uses this principle as the spine of the book, presenting recipes as starting points instead of fixed instructions.

The collection spans both familiar Singaporean dishes and newer creations shaped by the same flavors. Recipes include kaya toast with half-boiled eggs, nasi goreng, an eight-hour ox cheek rendang, green beans with turmeric and toasted coconut, and chilli crab spaghetti. Sweets such as pandan Swiss roll and black sticky rice pudding with rhubarb sit alongside savory staples. Some dishes, like the steamed pumpkin rice credited to the author's mother, carry a domestic history alongside their ingredients.

Singapore's food culture draws on Malay, Chinese, Indian, and other traditions, and its everyday cooking reflects generations of adaptation. Lee's approach mirrors that wider pattern, encouraging home cooks to treat each recipe as a framework they can reshape with whatever is available or preferred.

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Foreign Bodies by Hwee Hwee Tan opens with the kind of phone call that changes everything. Mei, a young Singaporean lawyer, learns that her English boyfriend Andy has been arrested and charged with running an international betting ring. Under Singapore's strict legal system, he has only nine days to establish his innocence or face life imprisonment. The story unfolds against a ticking clock, with Mei scrambling to mount a defense while confronting the gap between her own cultural assumptions and the foreign world Andy comes from.

Eugene, a Singaporean living in Holland and a childhood friend of Mei's, flies back to help. His return sets off a second layer of tension as old personal histories surface alongside the legal crisis. The three characters occupy overlapping but distinct positions between East and West, and the novel uses their shifting loyalties and buried secrets to examine how cultural identity shapes moral reasoning.

The setting matters as much as the plot. Singapore's legal framework, with its specific rules and penalties, is not simply backdrop but a force that drives the characters toward choices they might otherwise avoid. Tan grounds the story in questions of justice, trust, and the collision between inherited values and personal conscience.

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Set in Singapore across two timelines, How We Disappeared follows Wang Di, a woman whose husband's death in the year 2000 opens the door to decades of suppressed memory. As a sixteen-year-old during the Japanese occupation of 1942, Wang Di was taken from her village and forced into sexual slavery as a so-called comfort woman, a term used for women and girls coerced into service at military brothels. Nearly sixty years later, she lives alone with events she has never spoken about openly.

The novel's second strand centers on twelve-year-old Kevin, whose grandmother makes a confession on her deathbed that he was never meant to hear. Already dealing with his father's depression and bullying at school, Kevin begins searching for answers. His search eventually connects him to Wang Di and to the wartime history behind his grandmother's words.

Jing-Jing Lee drew in part on her own family's experiences to construct the novel. The two timelines move between occupied Singapore during the Second World War and the modern city-state at the turn of the millennium, tracing how silence around wartime atrocities can persist for generations and what happens when that silence finally breaks.

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