The Storm We Made
Vanessa Chan
Hodder & Stoughton: 2024
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In her ambitious debut novel, Malaysian writer Vanessa Chan pitches you straight into the action: “Teenage boys had begun to disappear.” A chorus of whispers follows: first about one boy, then a constellation of them. In a place like Bintang, “a town small enough for worry to mutate”, in 1945 Kuala Lumpur, housewife Cecily Alcantara starts carrying out a roll call of her three children every evening. Then Abel vanishes on his fifteenth birthday and Cecily is convinced it’s retribution for her secret treachery.
What unfolds is a crackling tale about the rise and fall of the Alcantara family’s fortunes set against the waxing and waning of political empires vying for Malaya, spanning the decade since 1935: from the British to the Japanese, then back again to the British at the close of the Second World War. Chan has a knack for propelling a story and evoking an atmospheric intimacy, beginning with the chattering milieu of small-town life to the pantomime of it during the Japanese Occupation between 1941 and 1945, when the performance of normalcy could mean the difference between life and death.
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- Tags: Emily Ding, Issue 36, Malaysia, Vanessa Chan