Bookworms, July is Asian Heritage Month. You know the drill: we’re celebrating narratives and voices from across the region by discovering great reads with fellow bookworms like you.
Photo: Fully Booked/Instagram
This time, we’re turning our gaze to a region closer to home: Southeast Asia. Home to 11 countries, countless cultures, and a wealth of literary talent, Southeast Asia boasts a vibrant and expansive literary canon shaped by its rich history and diverse peoples.
To celebrate this special occasion, we’ve chosen seven books you won’t want to miss by some of our favorite Southeast Asian authors. Hailing from Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines, and Singapore, these stories explore themes like immigration and diaspora, colonialism, queer identity, women’s autonomy, love in the modern era, and the enduring power of kindness. While this list is by no means exhaustive, we hope it inspires you to read more widely, discover new voices from the region, and add a few amazing Southeast Asian reads to your TBR. Happy reading!
Thailand: How to Pronounce Knife: Stories by Souvankham Thammavongsa
In this compelling short story collection, award-winning poet Souvankham Thammavongsa spotlights watchful children, wounded men, and restless women caught between cultures. Most stories delve into the experiences of immigrants and refugees, much like the author, who was born in the Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand, then raised and educated in Toronto. A common thread present in all fourteen stories is the feeling of invisibility, and Thammavongsa weaves sparse prose replete with beauty and raw honesty. As one of Thammavongsa’s characters says, “All we wanted was to live.” And in these stories, they do so—brightly, ferociously, unforgettably.
(Thammavongsa also wrote Pick a Color. Read: First Look Club Book Review of Pick a Color)
Indonesia: Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan (translated by Annie Tucker)
“One afternoon on a weekend in March, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years.” This is the unforgettable opening of Beauty is a Wound, an epic multigenerational novel from one of Indonesia’s finest authors, who delivers a powerful reckoning with Indonesia’s colonial past. A mesmerizing blend of magical realism, folklore, and fairy tales, the story follows Dewi Ayu, a Dutch-Indonesian prostitute, and her family across generations, and the supernatural events that haunt their lives and memories.
Drawing inspiration from wayang, or traditional Indonesian shadow puppetry, Beauty Is a Wound balances grotesque subject matter with sharp humor. Pick up this novel if you enjoy magical realism and sweeping family sagas.
Malaysia: My Giant Nerd Boyfriend by Yen Ee
Malaysian author and illustrator Yen Ee presents a light-hearted and irresistibly lovable comic collection based on her hit Webtoon with more than 800 million views. My Giant Nerd Boyfriend follows the everyday adventures of Fishball and her charmingly awkward 6’5″ boyfriend (now husband) as they navigate modern love, nerdy hobbies, and life in Malaysia with humor and heart– from Pomeranian cuddles and anime obsessions to snack-fueled late nights.
Adorable, funny, and endlessly endearing, it’s the kind of read that delivers both fuzzy feelings and laugh-out-loud moments. This is the first collection in a three-book series.
Philippines: Good People: Stories by Claire Betita De Guzman
Across time, cultures, and social classes, people have always aspired to be good. Yet, as Claire Betita De Guzman writes on her Instagram post, there is a thin line between “the spaces of right and wrong.”
In this debut short collection by the author of Hue City and No Boyfriend Since Birth, De Guzman explores the lives of fundamentally decent individuals who make questionable choices. We meet a thief who finds stealing easier than belonging; a serial cheater longing for genuine connection; an ex-prostitute haunted by the life she escaped; and an influencer navigating a world where likes seem to matter more than lives. These are ordinary people grappling with class divides, complicated family ties, and the compromises we make to survive.
With empathy and nuance, Good People invites us to examine our own moral boundaries and confront a difficult question: in a world that offers too little, what kind of person might we become?
Malaysia: The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng
The House of Doors is a lush and evocative novel by Malaysian and Booker Prize–nominated author Tan Twan Eng. A reimagining of real-life historical events, it serves as a “prequel” and backstory to W. Somerset Maugham’s famous short story, “The Letter.”
Set in the 1920s, Maugham travels with his secretary-slash-lover, Gerald Haxton, to Penang in search of a story. He gets that, and more, through his acquaintance with one of his hosts, Lesley Hamlyn, a white European woman trapped in an unhappy marriage.
Filled with wonderful imagery—from the bustle of a Southeast Asian market to a trek through a forgotten graveyard—The House of Doors is a magnificent tale of love, betrayal, and colonialism. It has the structure of a book you keep opening, until all its doors and secrets are finally revealed.
(READ: Jed reviews The House of Doors for First Look Club)
Cambodia: Afterparties: Stories by Anthony Veasna So
Afterparties is a collection of stories about Cambodian displacement and diaspora, the heavy shadow of the Khmer Rouge genocide, queer identity, and intergenerational trauma. With singular focus, sparkling with humor and wit, Cambodian-American author So’s narratives navigate social diasporic spaces his characters populate– donut shops, cookouts, house parties and more. Equal parts absurd and empathetic, Afterparties probes the complex lives of Cambodians forced to build new lives in another country and explores how they move forward after a traumatic past.
So has been praised for his deep empathy, combined with acerbic humor. George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo, wrote a glowing review of So’s prose– “the stories…are like beams of wry, affectionate light, falling from different directions on a complicated, struggling, beloved American community.”
So died unexpectedly just months before the publication of Afterparties. He was 28. The collection stands as a remarkable testament to a literary talent gone too soon.
Singapore: Tiger Girls by Felicia Low-Jimenez and Claire Low
Tiger Girls is a gripping dystopian graphic novel series in which Singaporean author-illustrator duo Felicia Low-Jimenez and Claire Low flip age-old Chinese superstitions on their head. What if girls born in the ominous Year of the Tiger were forced to live in the shadows and resist a deeply authoritarian and misogynistic government?
Set on a remote, monsoon-drenched island called Tiger Island, the graphic novel follows Suling, a young record-keeper who yearns to fight alongside her sisters. When a mysterious woman washes ashore during a raging monsoon, Suling’s carefully controlled world begins to unravel. Long-buried secrets tied to her own past threaten the island’s future, forcing Suling to decide: will she embrace her fate, or rewrite it?
Before it became a stunning full-length graphic novel, Tiger Girls began as a short story in the anthology Fish Eats Lions Redux, and was later adapted into a webcomic.
