Law-Yone’s penchant for the telling anecdote, the observation of, and connectivity to, the seemingly incidental, and the insight into the public and private personality makes this book a seminal contribution.
Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chats with the Dead is a darkly satirical novel with a good dose of the fatalistic humour Sri Lankans will find familiar.
The Anjaree Archive preserves material collected over the decades by one of Thailand’s first advocacy groups for gender and sexual rights. But can an archive also tell the story of its own messy creation?
In Now You See Us, Balli Kaur Jaswal has created a social world that magnifies the indignities and frustrations of everyday life as a migrant domestic worker in Singapore.
What a country doesn’t collectively talk about can often be more important than what it does. Tania Branigan’s book reveals the complexities of remembering the Cultural Revolution.
Our growing Thai family, now into its fourth generation, has given us plenty of smiles and laughter… and outbursts of anger and stubbornness and exasperation.
This could be After The Inquiry’s intention: to rile us up and stir a sense of indignation at a system in which the truth might not win out over politics and power
Janice Pariat chooses to manifest light in her writing across a ricocheting canvas that crisscrosses eras, characters in history, decisive philosophies in botany and momentous voyages.
Since participating in a protest in China puts one’s safety in jeopardy, using a blank sign serves as a form of plausible deniability. It’s also consistent with the complex reality of memory and historical events in China.
Shanghai has undergone three transformations in three years. First, it turned itself into a bubble, then it clamped down hard, monitoring every resident’s movements. Finally, it bounced back to normalcy, almost as if the previous years had been a fever dream.
A controversy—involving questions of privacy, consent, autonomy and censorship—began to develop around the documentary To My Nineteen-Year-Old Self, one that starkly parallels the Hong Kong government’s relationship with the youth.
Prism of Photography is an attempt to challenge the fixity of historical account, specifically the 6 October 1976 massacre at Thammasat University, through images.
Not only did the promise of “Naya Pakistan” never materialise, the country is actually much worse off today.
Could distance runner Soh Rui Yong’s absence from Singapore’s national team point to something bigger about how things work? He thinks this could be a “good opportunity” to ask questions.
In his memoirs, Burgess recalled Graham Greene telling him (not unkindly) that Time for a Tiger was an amusing but essentially frivolous book. Greene’s evaluation hasn’t stood the test of time.
A sordid saga of greed, corruption, desperate despots and out-of-control dam-building corporations—propelling the rapid demise of the Mekong River.
A poem by Anthony Tao
Mae Sot, Thailand, provides the anonymity a Burmese peace activist needs, although not without guarded boundaries and precarious undercurrents to navigate
A poem from Jake Dennis
A poem from Maung Day
A short story by Ngan Nguyen
Yo and Noom choose their books, in English and Thai, with care and purpose to ensure that Passport Bookshop has a clear identity and its patrons a quality read.