August 2024 – The Mountain Sings
August 2024 – The Mountains Sing The Mountains Sing – Nguyện Phan Quệ Mai 30th August 2024 Eight members of Book Group 1 read and discussed about Nguyện Phan Quệ Mai’s “The Mountains Sing” on the 30th of August. For some of us, the book’s topic about the Vietnam War brought back memories of how […]
May 2024 – Bride of the Sea – Eman Quotah
Eman Quotah is an Arab American novelist from Saudi Arabia and winner of the 2022 Arab American Book Award for Fiction. Her novel, “Bride of the Sea”, is about diverse cultures, immigration, religion and family bonds, about loss and healing, mistrust and secrecy. The story covers a period between 1970 to 2018 focusing on journeys […]
May 2024 – How To Stand Up To a Dictator – Maria Ressa
Book Group 1 read Maria Ressa’s How to Stand up to a Dictator on the 31st of May. Some of us had never heard of her before while others among us remember her as a CNN news reader seen here in Malaysia years ago. No matter from where we started, we all have new found […]
April 2024 – Convenience Store Woman – Sayaka Murata
Convenience Store woman is a short love story between a misfit and a store. Convenience store woman is an ironic and sharp-eyed look at contemporary work culture and the pressures to conform to it as well as fresh portrait of an unforgettable heroine. Keiko Furukura in her mid-thirties is an unmarried woman who has been […]
April 2024 – The Naked Don’t Fear the Water – Matthieu Aikins
This is a true and moving account of hardships endured and risks taken by refugees andmigrants in their quest for a better life. Matthieu Aikins is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalistliving in Kabul and reporting on the events in Afghanistan. By 2016, the Taliban havere-emerged as a force to be reckoned with and many Afghans […]
March, 2024 – The House of Doors – Tan Twan Eng
BG 1 & 2 – March 22nd 2024 Review – Joint meeting “The House of Doors” by Tan Twan Eng The House of Doors is an elaborate, beautifully written novel about memory, marriage, desire, and storytelling. For two weeks in 1921, W. Somerset Maugham and his secretary-lover Gerald Haxton stayed with the Hamlyns at their […]
Feb, 2024 – Dragon – Rose Gan
BG2 – February 28 2024. Book review – Dragon by Rose Gan This is the heading Nine of us met on the 28th of February to discuss the first of Rose Gan’s trilogy – Dragon. Rose Gan is a noted historian, especially in Indonesia and Malaysia. She is also a member of our Malaysian Culture Group. Dragon […]
Jan, 2024 – The Island of Missing Trees – Elif Shafak
The Island of Missing Trees By Elif Shafak For their first meeting in 2024 Book Group 1 read ‘The Island of Missing Trees’ By Elif Shafak. Leslie hosted the meeting at her home, there were 9 who attended. In 1974, two teenagers, from opposite sides of a divided Cyprus, meet at a tavern in the […]
Nov, 2023 – When Heaven & Earth Change Places by Le Ly Haslip
BG 2 – November 2023 – Review On the morning of 29th November, BG2 met to discuss this book. The book is the memoir of a girl on the verge of womanhood in a world turned upside down. Le Ly had suffered near-starvation, imprisonment, torture, rape, and the deaths of family members—but still held fast […]
Nov, 2023 – My Pen is the Wing of a Bird New Fiction by Afghan Women
BG1 – Review November 24th This is the first anthology of short fiction by Afghan women in an English translation. Eighteen writers tell stories that are both unique and universal – of family, work, childhood, friendship, war, gender identity and cultural traditions. The stories illuminate the personal impact of war on women’s lives and the […]