500 Words From Ovidia Yu

500 Words From...is a series of guest posts from authors, in which they talk about their books and characters.  Here, Ovidia Yu, one of Singapore’s most acclaimed authors, talks about Aunty Lee, feisty widow, amateur sleuth, and proprietor of The Lion City’s best-loved home-cooking restaurant.  Aunty Lee has now brought her charm and wit - not to mention her intelligence, nosiness, and crime-solving skills - to two delectable mysteries, Aunty Lee’s Delights, and Aunty Lee’s Deadly Specials.  Both books are published internationally by William Morrow Paperbacks, enabling readers far beyond Singapore to be beguiled by Aunty Lee. 

So, over to Ovidia…

“Inspiration for Aunty Lee? Parts of Aunty Lee came from various so-called aunties I know - not necessarily older, good at cooking or even female! She loves cooking and feeding people and as far as she is concerned, eating together is the best way of becoming friends. She also loves sorting out other people’s problems for them, including murders they may be suspected of committing.

Indie Spotlight / Tune in Tokyo: The Gaijin Diaries by Tim Anderson

Tim Anderson

It can be a hard slog being an indie author.  To keep self-published writers inspired our indie correspondent Raelee Chapman chats to Tim Anderson, a native of North Carolina, whose self-published memoir about his time living and working in Tokyo, Tune In Tokyo: The Gaijin Diaries, published in 2010, was picked up by AmazonEncore and republished to a wider audience a year later. It has now been translated into Thai.  

The original cover

Why did you choose to self-publish Tune in Tokyo: The Gaijin Diaries and which company/tools did you choose for this path?

I actually went the self-publishing route after a few years of my agent pitching the book, getting close to closing a deal, then getting the dreaded "not right for us at this time" response. One editor told us that, because David Sedaris had just released a book featuring a chapter set in Tokyo, she was going to pass, since that one chapter in that one book had obviously saturated the market with the one comical story set in Tokyo that could be told! So I started on the next book, but couldn't shake the feeling that there was an audience for Tune in Tokyo and I wanted to try to find it. I used the CreateSpace platform available from Amazon. I chose CreateSpace because the process seemed pretty straightforward, and it pretty much was!

This Week In The Asian Review Of Books

Asian Books Blog is not a review site.  If you want reviews, see the Asian Review of Books.  Here is a list of its newest reviews:

The Expat by Patricia Snel reviewed by Rosie Milne
Mecca: The Sacred City by Ziauddin Sardar reviewed by Marcia Lynx Qualey
Iqbal: The Life of a Poet, Philosopher and Politician by Zafar Anjum reviewed by Nigel Collett
Black Holes by He Jiahong reviewed by Peter Gordon
Desde Hong Kong: Poets in conversation with Octavio Paz, edited by Germán Muñoz, Tammy Ho Lai-ming and Juan José Morales reviewed by Henry Wei Leung

New In Paperback: The Strangler Vine by M.J.Carter

Calcutta, 1837. Young Ensign William Avery is tasked by his employers - the East India Company - to track down disgraced agent Xavier Mountstuart, lost to the jungle. Forced to take with him dissolute, disillusioned, errant genius ex-officer Jeremiah Blake, Avery is sure their mission is doomed. When their search leads them into Kali-worshipping, Thugee territory, survival depends upon trust. Fighting for their lives, the pair close in to their elusive quarry only to discover the horrifying truth behind their mission. With death and danger on all sides, is it too late to save themselves?

“M.J. Carter has cooked up a spicy dish: a pinch of Moonstone, a dash of Sherlock and a soupçon of Fu Manchu added to a rich stew of John Masters. A splendid romp” - William Dalrymple

“A splendid novel with an enthralling story, a wonderfully drawn atmosphere, and an exotic mystery that captivated me” - Bernard Cornwell

“A rattling good yarn” - A. N. Wilson, Financial Times

“The Strangler Vine is a considerable achievement, which left me waiting impatiently for a promised sequel” - The Times (London)

Published by Penguin.  Priced in local currencies. 

Tokyo Writers Workshop

Raelee Chapman, our indie correspondent, is seeking out the vast and varied writing communities across Asia, here she chats with John Gribble, organiser of Tokyo Writers Workshop. 

How long has your group been running?

The group goes back over thirty-five years. It was originally known as the Tokyo English Literature Society (TELS). Founded by Tom Ainley in 1977, it has always been a writers’ workshop, but in the early days the group was also active in publishing chapbooks under the TELS Press imprint, and putting out a magazine, Printed Matter.

Where are Tokyo Writers Workshop meetings held? 

For the last few years we have met in a classroom at Nihon University College of Art in Ekoda, Nerima Ward, Tokyo. We are fortunate in that we get this site free of charge, as co-organiser Karen McGee is a faculty member at the school.

Describe a typical meeting for us:

The meeting actually begins a week or more in advance of the scheduled Sunday afternoon gathering. Members post pieces of work they want discussed on our Meetup page. Everyone who plans to attend can then download the work and read it in advance of the meeting. We limit the number of posters to twelve, and each poster will get twenty minutes of discussion time - usually we have around twenty attendees. Each meeting we settle in the classroom for a three-to-four hour session and midway through we take a ten-minute break. 

Lion City Lit: Audrey Chin

Asian Books Blog is based in Singapore.  Lion City Lit explores literary life in our own backyard.  This week Singaporean author Audrey Chin is in conversation with Raelee Chapman.

As both a child of migrant Chinese and settled Peranakan parents, and also as a daughter-in-law of the Vietnamese diaspora, Audrey sees herself as an in-between person, a traveller through different cultures. She writes what she knows, telling stories about the search for belonging, about South East Asia, about her mixed cultural inheritance, and about the Westerners who colonised her region. Her most recent novel, As the Heart Bones Break, spans 60 years, and follows an Orange County Viet-Cong spy's quest to find peace and a home for his conflicted heart. It was shortlisted for the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize for English language fiction

What was your inspiration for As The Heart Bones Break? How much research was required for the novel and how long did it take to write?

I married into the Vietnamese diaspora over 30 years ago. In part, As The Heart Bones Break was written to address the fence of silence which my Vietnamese family and friends erected around their memories; I wanted to leave my children with a story of this history. But it was also written as a response to the dearth of Vietnam War fiction from the point of view of male Vietnamese participants, especially the majority who had loyalty to neither North nor South but merely wanted the war to be over.

This Week In The Asian Review Of Books

Asian Books Blog is not a review site.  If you want reviews, see the Asian Review of Books.  Here is a list of its newest reviews:

Scenes from the Enlightenment: A Novel of Manners by Kim Namcheon, translated by Charles La Shure reviewed by John Butler
The Blind Lady’s Descendants by Anees Salim reviewed by Divya Dubey
Chinese Rules: Mao’s Dog, Deng’s Cat, and Five Timeless Lessons from the Front Lines in China by Tim Clissold reviewed by Peter Gordon
Penguin China World War One specials round-up of reviews by various reviewers.