Marc Joan on Hangdog Souls

UK-based Marc Joan spent the early part of his life in India, and the early part of his career in biomedical research. He draws on this and other experience for his fiction, which has been widely published. His novelette, The Speckled God, was published by Unsung Stories in Feb 2017; he is a contributor to three forthcoming anthologies: Comma Press’s Mirror in the Mirror; Ceci n’est pas une histoire d’horreur, from Night Terror Novels; Ghost Stories for Starless Nights from DBND publishing. His first novel, Hangdog Souls, was published last year.

Kingdom of Mysore, 1799. A guilt-racked British Army deserter tries to win safety for those he loves — but his reckless bargaining only leaves him trapped between destinies, condemned to facilitate centuries of suicide and murder. Death after death, each death diminishes him, until — a quarter of a millennium later — a Keralan astrophysicist has the chance to annul the soldier’s Faustian bargain. But Chandy John is weakened by his own burden of grief. Will this twenty-first century scientist become just another helpless nexus between undeserved death and undeserved life?

Hangdog Souls is set in the Dravidian heartlands of South India — and in a blurred edgeland where alternative realities elide. Through linked narratives of guilt, shame and the search for absolution, this book takes readers from the arid Tamil plains to the highest peaks of the Nilgiris, and from occult horrors in Tipu Sultan’s kingdom to creeping madness in the world of particle physics.

Spanning three hundred years, the stories in Hangdog Souls weave together the fates and fortunes of multiple characters — individuals that echo through the generations, asking always the same question: What weight can balance the death of an innocent?

Here Marc talks to Asian Books Blog…

China Revisited: guest post by Paul French

Paul French, the series editor of China Revisited, is the bestselling author of Midnight in Peking and Destination Shanghai.

China Revisited is a series of extracted reprints of mid-19th to early-20th century Western impressions of Hong Kong, Macao and Southern China. It comprises excerpts from travelogues or memoirs written by missionaries, diplomats, military personnel, journalists, tourists and temporary sojourners. They came to China from Europe or the United States, some to work or to serve the interests of their country, others out of curiosity. Current titles are: Where Strange Gods Call: Harry Hervey’s 1920s Hong Kong, Macao and Canton Sojourns by Harry Hervey; Wanderings in China: Hong Kong and Canton, Christmas and New Year, 1878 / 1879 by Constance Gordon-Cumming; Ling-Nam: Hong Kong, Canton and Hainan Island in the 1880s by Benjamin Couch ‘BC’ Henry

Paul has fully annotated each title to provide relevant detail of Hong Kong, Macao and China at the time, to illuminate encounters with historically interesting characters, and to explain notable events.

Here, Paul explains the idea behind the series, and how he undertook research during lockdown. 

Someone is Coming: guest post by T.A. Morton

 

T.A. Morton is a Singapore-based British-Australian documentary scriptwriter with a keen interest in William Somerset Maugham. She recently completed a masters in crime and thriller writing at Cambridge University. Her debut novella, Someone is Coming, was published late last year. 

Philip Goundry is 93 and living out his days quietly in a care home in England when a young researcher from Singapore arrives, wanting to learn more about his former life in Malaya for the Singapore archives. His memory growing fitful, Philip is torn between wanting to unburden himself and staying silent, as he has done all these years, about the sinister and shocking events of his childhood on a Malayan rubber plantation. The truth, however, has a habit of winning.

Here, Morton discusses the inspiration for Someone is Coming, and the research behind the story...

Hungry Ghost: interview with Victoria Ying

Victoria Ying is a critically acclaimed author and artist living in Los Angeles. She started her career in the arts by falling in love with comic books, this eventually turned into a career working in animation and graphic novels. Her film credits include Tangled, Wreck it Ralph, Frozen, Paperman, Big Hero 6, and Moana. She is the illustrator on Disney Channels’s Diana Princess of the Amazons and the author and illustrator of City of Secrets, and the sequel City of Illusion. Her new novel Hungry Ghost, explores the teenage protagonist's struggles with eating disorders.

Valerie Chu is quiet, studious, and above all, thin. No one, not even her best friend Jordan, knows that she has been binging and purging for years. But when tragedy strikes, Val finds herself taking a good, hard look at her priorities, her choices, and her own body. The path to happiness may lead her away from her hometown and her mother’s toxic projections—but first she will have to find the strength to seek help.

Here, Victoria talks to Asian Books Blog.

"Owlish". Nicky Harman reviews a new novel by Dorothy Tse, translated by Natascha Bruce

 

Owlish is the story of Professor Q, a university lecturer in the city of Nevers. He is not a happy man: his wife refuses intimacy with him, his students protest, then disappear, and he is visited by sinister authority figures. He takes refuge in a fantasy world and his life is briefly illuminated by his passion for Aliss, a doll who is introduced to him by the mysterious Owlish. But as the story progresses, the sanctuary he has found for their love affair, an abandoned church, is raided, the doll is destroyed, and his wife Maria reclaims him. In the final pages, it is not the forces of political repression but Maria and their doctor who seal his fate: ‘Professor Q thought of the sky-blue pills he would no longer have any reason to take and almost felt like laughing…He was fast asleep, his upper body collapsed onto the sofa. Maria came to stand over him, regarding his body as she might a placid lake. The sleeping pill had worked quickly…’

This novel draws the reader in on many levels. It is suspenseful: can the Prof find a new life? What will happen to the doll? It is political; there is no attempt to disguise the parallels between the fictitious island, its communities and languages, and present-day Hong Kong – in that respect, it’s wonderfully cheeky. And the language is beautiful – more on that later.

Make It New: A warm welcome for Gaudy Boy's 'New Singapore Poetries'

A gathering of new names

One July evening, I took the chance to ask Jee Leong Koh – an editor of the new Gaudy Boy anthology New Singapore Poetries – what exactly was ‘new’ about the selection, slated for a pre-Christmas release in December 2022. The list of poets who’d made the cut had just been announced, and though all qualified on the same basis of having published not more than one poetry collection, some (including Jee’s co-editor Marylyn Tan, also a winner of the Singapore Literature Prize) were by now firmly established in the narrow stratosphere of Singapore writing.   

The Visible Invisibles: Stories of Migrant Workers in Asia, guest post by Shivaji Das and Yolanda Yu

 

Featuring a careful curation of unconventional yet universal life stories from a diverse cast of characters, The Visible Invisibles: Stories of Migrant Workers in Asia offers a human connection to the undocumented lives of migrant workers across Asia, presenting stories of adventure, love, hope, loss, guilt and redemption. It is written by an inter-racial migrant couple coming from India and China who have played a foundational role in giving voices to migrant workers across Asia and Africa through acclaimed platforms such as Migrant Poetry Competitions and the Global Migrant Festival.

Shivaji Das is the author of four critically acclaimed travel, art and business books. He has been actively involved in migrant issues and is the conceptualizer and organizer for the acclaimed Migrant Worker and Refugee Poetry Contests in Singapore, Malaysia and Kenya and is the founder and director of the Global Migrant Festival. He was born and brought up in the north-eastern province of Assam in India, but is now a Singapore citizen.

Yolanda Yu’ s Neighbor’s Luck, a collection of short stories, was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Award 2020. She is a co-organizer of the Singapore Migrant Worker Poetry Contest and Global Migrant Festival, also an event host and coordinator for outreach for the Chinese migrant worker community. Born in North-Eastern China, Yolanda moved to Singapore on scholarship in 1998 and has been living there since then. 

So, over to Shivaji and Yolanda…