Books
Singapore and, to a lesser extent, Malaysia have healthy English-language publishing scenes, churning out books on local history, politics, society and culture, plus a modest amount of fiction. Besides the major bookshops listed throughout this Guide, a good source for specialist titles is the mail-order-only Select Books (
selectbooks.com.sg).
In the reviews that follow, books marked 
are especially recommended, while o/p signifies a title is out of print. As per Chinese custom, surnames are given first for Chinese authors who don’t have Christian names; also, some Malay and Indian authors who do not have surnames are listed under their given name.
Travel and general interest
Encyclopedia of Malaysia. A brilliantly produced series of tomes on different aspects of Malaysia, all beautifully illustrated and – not always the case with locally published material – competently edited. The volumes on the performing arts and architecture are particularly recommended. Available as individual volumes or as a set.
Isabella Bird The Golden Chersonese. Delightful epistolary romp through old Southeast Asia, penned by the intrepid Bird, whose adventures in the Malay states in 1879 ranged from strolls through Singapore’s streets to elephant-back rides. A free download from various online libraries.
Robin Hanbury-Tenison Finding Eden. Forty years after leading the pioneering Royal Geographical Society expedition to the then newly established Mulu National Park, Hanbury-Tenison revisits the experience in this book, much of which dwells on the minutiae of the enterprise, as noted in his diaries. The book is at its best when recounting the discovery of the Garden of Eden and his close bond with the Penan people.
Tom Harrisson Borneo Jungle and World Within. The abrasive, eccentric polymath Tom Harrisson spent much of his professional life studying Sarawak’s Dyak groups, especially the Kayan, Kenyah and Punan, whom he greatly admired. Borneo Jungle is a lively account of his first trip during the 1930s; World Within the story of how he parachuted into the highlands during World War II to organize Dyak resistance against the Japanese.
Sebastian Hope Outcasts of the Islands. Still available as an e-book, this is the 2001 account of the writer’s extraordinary attempts to get to know Southeast Asia’s itinerant sea peoples, notably Sabah’s Bajau Laut at Semporna, at a time when many still lived at sea off Semporna and there were just two resorts at Mabul.
Agnes Keith Land Below the Wind. Bornean memories galore, in this charming account of expat life in prewar Sabah; Keith’s true eye and assured voice produce a heartwarming picture of a way of life now long gone. Her naive sketches perfectly complement the childlike wonder of the prose.
Redmond O’Hanlon Into The Heart of Borneo. A hugely entertaining yarn recounting O’Hanlon’s refreshingly amateurish romp through the jungle to a remote summit on the Sarawak/Kalimantan border, partnered by the English poet James Fenton.
History and politics
Munshi Abdullah The Hikayat Abdullah. Raffles’ one-time clerk, Melaka-born Abdullah became diarist of some of the most formative years of Southeast Asian history; his firsthand account is crammed with illuminating vignettes and character portraits.
Barbara Watson Andaya and Leonard Andaya The History of Malaysia. Unlike more paternalistic histories penned by former colonists, this newly updated standard text on the region takes a more even-handed view of Malaysia, and finds time for cultural coverage, too.
Farish Noor What Your Teacher Didn’t Tell You. An enjoyable series of lectures on subjects that remain awkward in Malaysia, from ethnicity to sexual attitudes.
Victoria Glendinning Raffles and the Golden Opportunity. An enjoyable, thorough biography of Singapore’s founder Sir Stamford Raffles, though occasionally bogged down in the details of his upbringing and domestic life.
Patrick Keith Ousted. Most of the largely young population of Malaysia and Singapore know little of the events that saw Singapore leaving the federation in 1965. But, as this fine memoir by a former Malaysian government adviser demonstrates, many of the issues that led to the rift continue to shape both countries and their mutual ties today – Malaysia is still laden with ethnically based politics, while Singapore remains the fiefdom of the PAP.
Sonny Liew The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye. This internationally acclaimed graphic novel appears to celebrate an overlooked genius of Singapore comic art. In reality, Liew’s “retrospective” on the fictional Mr Chan’s satirical work and struggle for recognition is a savage indictment of the autocratic trajectory of postwar Singapore politics – a useful antidote to establishment accounts.
James Minchin No Man Is An Island (o/p). This well-researched, and at times critical, study of Lee Kuan Yew refuses to kowtow to Singapore’s ex-prime minister and is hence unavailable in Singapore itself.
John Curtis Perry Singapore: Unlikely Power. Not quite as critical as it could be, but a highly readable history nonetheless, focusing mainly on development and economic influence rather than society and politics.
C.M. Turnbull A History of Modern Singapore 1819–2005. Mary Turnbull had barely completed a major update of this standard work when she died in 2008, and what a fine legacy: the new edition is lucid, thorough, nearly always spot-on in its analysis and utterly readable.
World War II
Russell Braddon The Naked Island (o/p). Southeast Asia under the Japanese: Braddon’s disturbing yet moving first-hand account of the POW camps of Malaya, Singapore and Siam salutes courage in the face of appalling conditions and treatment; worth scouring secondhand stores for.
Spencer Chapman The Jungle is Neutral. This riveting firsthand account of being lost, and surviving, in the Malay jungle during World War II reads like a breathless novel.
Agnes Keith Three Came Home. Pieced together from scraps of paper secreted in latrines and teddy bears, this is a remarkable story of survival in the face of Japanese attempts to eradicate the “proudery and arrogance” of the West in the World War II prison camps of Borneo.
Eric Lomax The Railway Man. Such is the power of Lomax’s artless, redemptive and moving story of capture during the fall of Singapore, torture by the Japanese and reconciliation with his tormentor after fifty years, that many reviewers were moved to tears.
Lucy Lum The Thorn of Lion City. You might expect a memoir of a wartime childhood in Singapore to be dominated by the savagery of the Japanese, but that’s nothing compared to the torment inflicted on the author at the hands of her manipulative and violent mother and grandmother. That it’s all told with zero artifice only makes it more compelling.
Culture and society
James Harding and Ahmad Sarji P. Ramlee: The Bright Star. An uncritical but enjoyable biography of the Malay singer, actor and director sometimes likened to Malaysia’s Harry Belafonte. More importantly, it’s a window onto what seems like a different era – though little more than half a century ago – when Singapore was the centre of the Malay entertainment universe, and when Malay life was, frankly, more carefree than today.
Michael Heppell Iban Art: Sexual Selection and Severed Heads This excellent illustrated volume provides a deeper coverage of Iban art than the pretty pictures might lead you to assume, detailing the motifs and symbolism of traditional clothes, tattoos and carvings.
Erik Jensen Where Hornbills Fly. In the 1950s, before he became a British diplomat, the author arrived in Sarawak as a callow young man with idealistic notions of learning about the Iban. He soon wound up living in longhouses in the Lemanak area (near Batang Ai), helping the Iban make the change to a settled existence without imposing upon them as a “superior” foreigner. His memoir is so intricately and tenderly observed you can only wonder why he waited half a century to write up his experiences.
Lat Kampung Boy and Town Boy. Two comic-strip albums by the country’s foremost cartoonist about growing up in Malaysia during the 1950s and 60s; gentle and fun, though without any sentimentality.
Charmaine Leung 17A Keong Saik Road. This likeable autobiography recounts the author’s childhood in a Singapore brothel. The nonlinear narrative spans many decades and can be confusing, but is ultimately rewarding for its insights into how ordinary people kept afloat as Chinatown (and Singapore at large) changed dramatically around them.
Paul Malone The Peaceful People. A moving, accessible study of the Penan people of Sarawak and of the enormous upheavals they have been through, transitioning from hunter-gatherers to a largely settled existence in just a few decades. Along the way Malone recounts their run-ins with authority and their ambivalent, unequal relationship with the logging industry eating into their ancestral lands.
Bernard Sellato Innermost Borneo: Studies in Dayak Cultures. Anthropologist Sellato spent much of the 1990s with the indigenous Borneo tribes of Kalimantan, who are related to the Sea Dyaks of Sarawak. This excellent ethnographic work contains ravishing images of a traditional, isolated world that will eventually be subsumed into greater Indonesia.
Dina Zaman I Am Muslim. A well-observed set of wry essays, with more candour than would have been appropriate in this guidebook, on Islam as practised in Malaysia; form without enough substance is, sadly, often the verdict. The section on sexual attitudes is particularly recommended.
food and cookery
Aziza Ali Aziza’s Creative Malay Cuisine; Sambal Days, Kampong Cuisine. For years, Aziza Ali ran the only worthwhile high-end Malay restaurant in Singapore, and her Creative Malay Cuisine cookbook is packed with great recipes, though the emphasis is firmly on southern rather than east coast dishes. Sambal Days is quite different, a memoir of a middle-class Malay childhood that soon morphs into a reverie of special foods for just about every occasion.
Betty Saw Rasa Malaysia: the complete Malaysion cookbook. A nicely illustrated cookbook that covers dozens of the standard dishes you’ll find served at food courts and in homes around the country, including various Chinese and Nyonya recipes, though very little South Indian fare. It’s all organized by state, which helps give a feel for regional cuisine, though annoyingly there’s no index.
Natural history and THE ENVIRONMENT
Chin Shui Hiung, Ravi Mandalam and Christopher Chin East Kinabalu. Gorgeous photos of montane plants and Mount Kinabalu’s incredible vistas, taken on multi-day expeditions in little-visited areas which have since been altered by the 2015 earthquake.
G.W.H. Davison and Chew Yen Fook A Photographic Guide to Birds of Borneo; M. Strange and A. Jeyarajasingam A Photographic Guide to Birds of Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore; Charles M. Francis A Photographic Guide to the Mammals of Southeast Asia. Well keyed and user-friendly, these slender volumes carry oodles of glossy plates that make positive identifying a breeze.
Junaidi Payne Wild Malaysia: The Wildlife and Landscapes of Peninsular Malaysia, Sarawak and Sabah. Coffee-table book, recently reissued, capturing forest and beach vistas of the kind that linger in the mind long after you’ve left Malaysia.
Alfred Russel Wallace The Malay Archipelago. The immensely readable journal of Wallace’s 1854–62 expedition to collect natural history specimens in Borneo and Indonesia, during which he independently formulated the theory of evolution by natural selection – prompting Charles Darwin to publish his landmark On the Origin of Species.
Lukas Straumann Money Logging: On the Trail of the Asian Timber Mafia. An unrelenting exposé of avarice and corruption at the heart of Sarawak’s government and timber corporations, by the executive director of the Bruno Manser Fund, which campaigns on behalf of the state’s indigenous tribes.
Art and architecture
Julian Davison and Luca Invernizzi Tettoni Black & White: The Singapore House; Peter and Waveney Jenkins The Planter’s Bungalow. Two tomes dealing with colonial “Anglo-Malay” residences, often strange hybrids of mock-Tudor and Southeast Asian elements, and sometimes raised off the ground on posts like a kampung house. Both volumes also examine the lives of those who occupied these houses, not always as wealthy as you might assume.
Farish A. Noor and Eddin Khoo The Spirit of Wood: The Art of Malay Woodcarving. Much weightier in tone than your average coffee-table book, this deals not only with the superb woodcarving produced on the east coast of the Peninsula and in southern Thailand, but also with the whole pre-Islamic consciousness that subtly imbues the woodcarver’s art. Packed with great photos, too, of gorgeous timber mosques, incredibly detailed kris hilts and the like.
Kang Ger-Wen Decoration & Symbolism in Chinese Architecture. This beautifully photographed book focuses on temples and clan houses in Singapore, but will come in handy at any Chinese historic building in Malaysia, dissecting the meanings and stories hidden in roofing styles, vegetal motifs, altars and so on.
Peter Lee and Jennifer Chen The Straits Chinese House. A beautifully illustrated volume exploring Peranakan domestic artefacts and their now largely vanished traditions; an excellent memento of a visit to the Baba-Nyonya museums of Penang, Melaka and Singapore.
Anthony Ratos and H. Berber Orang Asli and their Wood Art. One of few accessible explorations of Orang Asli lifestyles and cultures, though note that only a third of this picture-heavy volume is devoted to their fantastical carvings; the rest of the photos are of Asli settlements and generic, if pretty, jungle scenes.
Robert Winzeler The Architecture of Life and Death in Borneo. Highly readable, illustrated study of the traditional architecture of Borneo, looking at the evolution of longhouses over the years and symbolism in building design.
Fiction
Eric Ambler Passage of Arms. Recently reissued, this 1959 thriller centres on a lowly Indian rubber-estate clerk who finds a valuable guerrilla arms cache during the Malayan Emergency. Hankering to launch his own bus company, he partners with some wily Chinese businessmen and a naive American in an attempt to peddle the booty. Things go awry, inevitably; the fun is in finding out who comes out on top.
Anthony Burgess The Long Day Wanes. Burgess taught at Kuala Kangsar’s posh Malay College in the mid-1950s. His Malayan trilogy (Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket and Beds in the East), currently available in one volume, provides a witty and acutely observed vision of the country, underscoring the various racial tensions and prejudices during the closing years of colonial rule.
Bernice Chauly Once We Were There. Probably the most explicit novel ever written about Malaysia (tellingly, it was published in Singapore), with plenty of sex and drugs as a bunch of Westernized activists in KL graduate from anti-establishment journalism to the messiness of married life and “proper” jobs. The one flaw is the lack of a satisfying resolution to a shocking incident midway through.
James Clavell King Rat. Set in Japanese-occupied Singapore, a gripping tale of survival in the notorious Changi Prison.
Joseph Conrad Lord Jim. Southeast Asia provides the backdrop to the story of Jim’s desertion of an apparently sinking ship and subsequent efforts to redeem himself; modelled upon the sailor A.P. Williams, Jim’s character also yields echoes of Rajah Brooke of Sarawak.
J.G. Farrell The Singapore Grip. Lengthy novel – Farrell’s last – of World War II Singapore in which real and fictitious characters flit from tennis to dinner party as the countdown to the Japanese occupation begins.
Barbara Ismail Shadow Play. Lightweight whodunnits seem to be taking off in Malaysia and Singapore: the latter has its Inspector Singh franchise, and now there’s Ismail’s Kelantan-based Kain Songket Mysteries series. It kicks off with this decent enough novel about a Kota Bharu woman who, not content with selling brocade, turns out to be surprisingly good at solving murders – though not all the allusions to Kelantan’s distinctive culture are convincing.
W. Somerset Maugham Collected Short Stories Volume 4. Peopled by hoary sailors, bored plantation-dwellers and colonials wearing mutton-chop whiskers and topees, this volume of Maugham’s short stories resuscitates the Malaya of the 1900s; quintessential colonial literature graced by an easy style and a ready eye for a story.
Golda Mowe Iban Dream. The fabulous saga of a boy raised by apes who has to tackle a series of quests as a rite of passage. Just about every indigenous group in Sarawak makes an appearance at some point in what isn’t a bad read once you get used to the mystical-fable style. A sequel, Iban Journey, appeared in 2016.
Preeta Samarasan Evening Is The Whole Day. Set mostly in 1950s Ipoh, this debut novel ruthlessly dissects the lives of a dysfunctional upper-middle-class Indian family, with precious few laughs to be had in a tale of infidelity, class disparities and violence behind closed doors.
Han Suyin And The Rain My Drink. Han is best remembered for her autobiographical novel, which inspired the 1950s Hollywood hit Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, but the newly reissued And The Rain My Drink, published in 1956, deserves wider attention; there is no better novel of the upheavals of the Communist insurgency and the fag-end of British rule in Malaya, informed by Han’s time living in 1950s Johor Bahru.
Tan Twan Eng The Gift of Rain and The Garden of Evening Mists. By a South Africa-based Malaysian, both these novels are deliberately paced and infused with the author’s passion for Japanese culture. The first, set in Penang, focuses on the curious relationship between a Eurasian boy and his family’s Japanese tenant as war breaks out, while the second follows a Chinese wartime internee during the subsequent Emergency, when she returns to the Cameron Highlands to confront her ghosts and an old Japanese acquaintance.