Books published by Monsoon Books

Juggling her bookstore job, her family, her friends and worries about her future is keeping Singaporean Mei busy but when a customer is murdered, Mei needs to know why. Taking lessons from her favourite detectives, the always inquisitive bookseller navigates the darker side...

Unemployed, broke and engaged in a telepathic turf war with a feral cat behind an Okinawa convenience store, 28-year-old Fred Buchanan is hopelessly lost in life. After a fortuitous bet on the island bullfights, he boards a ferry to Kobe then a slow train to Tokyo, chasing shadows of a halogen dream. Rainy Day Ramen and the Cosmic Pachinko is told in two distinct overlapping and interwoven formats. Join Fred's drunken, staggering, metaphysical odyssey from Okinawa to Tokyo, and his search for meaning beyond the physical path trodden. The novel blends Murakami-esque magical realism with a coming-of-age on-the-road story.

Arthur Grimsby is an ageing museum curator in 1960s Singapore. He fears Singapore's looming independence and his redundancy and tries to complete one final piece of work: the life story of an real-life eccentric 19th-century Englishman called Alexander Hare. Hare was a slave-owner, the epitome of masculine, colonial exploitation, and the creator of an Asian harem initially in Borneo and then on an uninhabited atoll that would become the Cocos-Keeling Islands.

On the Thai island of Koh Samui, Thanikarn, a masseuse with traditional values, has never fallen in love - until she meets Lucas, a dashing French American musician. After a brief and passionate affair, Lucas returns home and Thanikarn doubts she'll ever see him again. Will Thanikarn find out what has become of Lucas? Will their lives ever cross again? Only unforeseen events and the gift of a song will decide.

In post-WWII Laos, Vietnamese communists secretly commence to infiltrate the kingdom. They are countered by four dedicated Lao 'moles' who try to thwart these aims. Gurkha Colonel Jason Rance is unwittingly dragged into a confrontation between one of the Lao moles and a Thai spy and the mole gives him a ring as a reward for saving his life. During his appointment in Laos as military attaché, Rance becomes a target of the KGB and of the Vietnamese communists, and is sought by the remaining three Lao moles because of the ring in his possession.

Hungry Ghosts is the volume three in the Singapore Saga, a series of historical fiction covering the early years of Singapore, and follows Forbidden Hill and Chasing the Dragon.

In 1943 on Bougainville Island, New Guinea, a Japanese officer beheads Hugh Rand, an Australian spy -- a coast watcher. But Rand's influence transcends his death. For decades he plagues characters who strive to cope with him and one another in New Guinea, the Gilbert Islands, Australia and Japan. The layers unfold as the author entices us through cultural, historical and intellectual curtains, deep into minds and relationships disturbed by the Pacific war and Rand's legacy.

The eccentric saints of Java's impact both on challenging fundamentalist aspects of Islam and shaping the dynamic of modern Indonesia is considered in this illustrated and map-bearing investigation.