By The Book

To mark the 25th anniversary of The Women’s Prize for Fiction, a campaign called “Reclaim Her Name” was run to give “female writers the credit they deserve”. In line with this, 25 special editions of novels were reprinted using the real names of 26 women writers who used male pseudonyms - including the likes of George Eliot, Vernon Lee, and George Sand. We discuss the...

Communism, a handover of power, the importance of journalism, frustrated love, and a central familial mystery. All these threads are woven together in William Tham's novel, The Last Days, which is set under the shadow of the Malayan Emergency. We discuss the research and process of putting this work together, and the pressure of writing about this particular time in history. And then in Footnotes,...

One of few Malaysian authors to be published internationally, Hanna Alkaf prides herself on writing unabashedly Malaysian stories. Following the success of her YA book “The Weight of our Sky”, she’s back with “The Girl and the Ghost”, a middle-grade title about a young Malaysian girl and a pelesit that finds its way into her life. But along the way, Hanna also unfolds...

2020 is a year that has always loomed large in the Malaysian imagination - a year when we would be a fully developed country (whatever that means), and really come into our own (ditto). 2020: An Anthology is all about exploring what 2020 means to 20 Malaysian writers, and filtering this year and its promise through short pieces of writing. We sit down and discuss our favourites, and how it feels t...

2020 is a year that has always loomed large in the Malaysian imagination - a year when we would be a fully developed country (whatever that means), and really come into our own (ditto). 2020: An Anthology is all about exploring what 2020 means to 20 Malaysian writers, and filtering this year and its promise through short pieces of writing. We sit down and discuss our favourites, and how it feels t...

2020 is a year that has always loomed large in the Malaysian imagination - a year when we would be a fully developed country (whatever that means), and really come into our own (ditto). 2020: An Anthology is all about exploring what 2020 means to 20 Malaysian writers, and filtering this year and its promise through short pieces of writing. We sit down and discuss our favourites, and how it feels t...

Salman Rushdie might be best known for his fifth book, The Satanic Verses - which resulted in a fatwa against him in 1989 - but a dive into his body work shows that there is much more to him than notoriety. In his 40-year career as a writer, Rushdie has published nearly 20 books, many of which won widespread acclaim. In this month’s Bibliography, we look at how Rushdie’s unique approac...

If everyone were eating (farmed) human flesh - would you? That's the question put forth in Agustina Bazterrica's provocative novel Tender is the Flesh, a story that's set in a world in which animals had to be culled because of a mysterious virus, and humans are now the only livestock in the meat industry. We discuss the ways in which this book explores ideas of consumption, propaganda and normalis...

If you remember those Choose Your Own Adventure books from your childhood, you will immediately recognise that exciting feeling of being given a choice within a novel’s story. Intan Paramaditha, however, adapts the concept into a much more adult world that looks at questions of travel, migration, agency, and privilege - which all begin with a woman in Jakarta being given a pair of red shoes...

In conjunction with International Friendship Day, we dedicate this episode of By the Book to examining how literature has traditionally handled this relationship. And it turns out that outside of sidekicks, toxic friendships and loners, examples of healthy friendships are hard to come by. Nevertheless, we discuss examples including Anne Shirley and Diana Barry, Asterix and Obelix, and the Losers C...

For this month’s book club, fellow BFMer and Potterhead Dhanya Nair joins us to discuss J.K. Rowling’s official return to the world of children’s stories, with her free online serialised novel, The Ickabog. Expect plenty of excitement as we dissect the fairy tale that nevertheless displays some unexpectedly dark plot turns, and decide whether Rowling manages to weave her signatur...

Purveyor of witty, sparkling dialogue, observations about women, life and marriage, and writer of heartfelt romance, Jane Austen remains one of the most popular (and reprinted) authors of all time. In our second episode of Bibliography, our monthly author series, we focus on Jane Austen's life, six novels, and modern interpretations of her work. After, we talk about some of our favourite book-to-s...

In a book that is being described as “Crazy Rich Asians meets Bridget Jones’s Diary”, Malaysian-born-Singapore-based writer Lauren Ho’s debut Last Tang Standing tells the humorous story of 33-year-old Andrea Tang: a successful lawyer and woman of the world, but also about to become the lone unmarried member of her generation in her family. We speak with Lauren about writing...

He caddied for prime ministers and gave lessons to kings, and rubbed shoulders with golfing greats in his own time. The Legend is about the life of a local sporting hero, V Nellan, focused not just on his love of golf but about a life well-lived and well-told. We speak to one of the co-authors of the book, Bob Holmes. After that, on Footnotes, in conjunction with the 4th of July, we talk about boo...

He caddied for prime ministers and gave lessons to kings, and rubbed shoulders with golfing greats in his own time. The Legend is about the life of a local sporting hero, V Nellan, focused not just on his love of golf but about a life well-lived and well-told. We speak to one of the co-authors of the book, Bob Holmes. After that, on Footnotes, in conjunction with the 4th of July, we talk about boo...

In this month’s book club, we are joined by history PhD candidate and former BFMer Chase Caldwell Smith, to discuss Rutger Bregman’s Humankind - A Hopeful History. Together, we discuss the book’s case for optimism, its central thesis that humans are inherently decent, and whether we were able to get onboard with the idea. In Footnotes, this leads us to discussing other books that...

On this episode of By the Book, we observe International Fairy Day by looking into all the ways in which the fair folk and the land of Faery have influenced our stories and oral traditions. We also discuss some of our favourite stories that have fairies (and why they're different from fairy tales). See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Bibliography, our monthly author series where we focus on and deep-dive into one specific author’s works, style, influences and legacy. We’ll also be talking about interpretations and adaptations of their works. Kicking things off, is perhaps the best known writer of all time, the Bard himself, William Shakespeare. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From telling the true version of the Lord of the Flies, to dismantling long-held beliefs around the Stanford Prison Experiment and the murder of Kitty Genovese, Humankind is a book that sets out the argument that humans are fundamentally decent. Veering through examples and science from different disciplines such as biology, psychology, and human history, this is a book that attempts to cut throug...

With June 1 being the Global Day of Parents, we celebrate good parents in literature (despite their relative rarity!), and talk about how different authors have depicted the lasting impact of good parenting in their stories. Books discussed include A Girl from Yamhill (Beverly Cleary), About a Boy (Nick Hornby), Boy, Snow Bird (Helen Oyeyemi), A Song of Ice and Fire (George R. R. Martin), Charlie...

A delightful, (relatively) standalone novel in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, Small Gods tells the story of a god who finds himself in the body of a one-eyed tortoise, seeking the help of a true believer. It's a quest story, but also one that tells a story of power, humanism and philosophy - all while being laugh out loud funny. Dr Murallitharan Munisamy joins us for this month's book club, a...

Clarissa Goenawan is an Indonesian-born Singaporean writer who wrote the award-winning 2015 novel “Rainbirds”. In her latest novel, “The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida”, she travels through Japan’s history to tell the story of a tragic mystery. We speak with Clarissa about writing histories and trauma, and how she delved into a different culture in her fiction. We wra...

As we head into the end (fingers crossed) of the Movement Control Order, we're being inundated with ideas and concepts surrounding the New Normal, as we learn to live in a world with Covid-19, and all the adjustments that might entail. So in this episode, we discuss books that talk about this very thing: The New Normal, through the prism of personal stories, migration, and even money. And in Footn...

Emotions like anxiety and grief aren’t always easy to explain or express - perhaps that’s why reading about them within the pages of a book can be so compelling. This week, we discuss books that feature these complex emotions as themes, and then close things off with more recommendations of long articles to read. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As self-avowed fans of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics, we knew there was no way we could discuss the entire series in one show. So we're continuing our journey through this complex series, with its weave of dreams, mythology and culture, by discussing Volumes 4 and 5: Season of Mists and A Game of You. Joining us on this journey is BFM’s own Haniff Baharudin. We then close off with some...