SINGAPORE – The Straits Times’ arts writers look back at some of the books that touched us in 2023. Also, reviews of The Enigmatic Madam Ingram by Meihan Boey, and Nine Yard Sarees: A Short Story Cycle by Prasanthi Ram. These articles include affiliate links. When you buy through them, we may earn a small commission.
ST arts team’s best reads of 2023
In the course of the year, The Straits Times’ arts team has reviewed, and interviewed the authors of, nearly 200 books, both local and international.
In the spirit of year-end reflection, we put some prompts to ourselves to revisit some of the greatest hits of 2023. Here is hoping you will discover your next favourite read.
Book review: Victorian tropes, Asian monsters entertain in Meihan Boey’s The Enigmatic Madam Ingram
Meihan Boey is indisputably the product of a happily rojak Singapore upbringing. The country’s post-colonial education system, with its European-heavy literature syllabus, and its multicultural society with a panoply of gods and monsters, is the perfect Petri dish for her creative imagination.
The resulting mishmash of myths was put to entertaining effect in her 2021 The Formidable Miss Cassidy, which shared that year’s Epigram Fiction Prize with Sebastian Sim’s And The Award Goes To Sally Bong!.
Fans of the earlier book will doubtless enjoy this sequel, which moves the timeline of the main narrative to turn-of-20th-century Singapore.
Book review: Prasanthi Ram’s Nine Yard Sarees conjures epic chorus of Tamil women’s voices
At 272 pages, Singaporean writer Prasanthi Ram’s debut book of fiction might not be sized like an epic, but her sprawling narrative certainly packs the punch of one, relating the saga of diasporic life in sensuous, succulent detail.
Through 11 interlinked stories and nine female narrators, Nine Yard Sarees follows generations of a fictional Tamil Brahmin family as their lives are dispersed from Kalakad in Tamil Nadu to primarily Singapore, but also Sydney, New York and Connecticut.
Its cast of rotating protagonists take turns to tell their story. At its core, there is the serene Rajeswari Iyer, who finds love at an ashram soon after her husband’s death; the imperious Padma, her daughter, who has trouble raising her own children according to Brahmin traditions; the stoic Prema, Padma’s sister, who struggles with her daughter Vani’s sexuality.
Ram also enlists voices from outside the family proper – a domestic cleaner, a cool auntie who chooses singlehood – to create multiple counterpoints of privilege, belief systems and paths that speak to varied experiences of love and hurt as and between women.
The Straits Times’ Weekly Bestsellers Dec 30
The Little Liar by Mitch Albom tops the Fiction list.
