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Shortlisted for Singapore Book Awards 2017 (Best Children’s Picture Book category) Shortlisted for the AFCC Asian Children's Book Awards 2017 In this engaging and humorous story, a young girl has a familiar and common encounter with her Grandma that most young children often have with elderly relatives. It’s time for the yearly reunion dinner with Grandma. She asks the same questions as she would every year. However, we see how this sameness amidst our ever-changing environment makes home and family all the more precious.
Timothy Pong has enough trouble at home without throwing his first year of secondary school into the mix. The Pong family only interact with each other through digital machines rather than human contact. Twelve-year-old Timothy is too young to own a phone, according to his mum, so he hasn’t actually spoken to his family in years as he can’t WhatsApp his parents or Snapchat his older sister. Even worse, the most menacing bully in school, who also just happens to be the prettiest girl Timothy has ever seen, has plucked him out as her new favourite target. Luckily, Timothy has a few ideas up his sleeve to survive Secondary One, as well as the help of his undernourished friend Rudy, who, when not helping Timothy, can be found eating grass in the school field. When their first plan goes horribly wrong and Timothy is caught on camera with his pants down – the most embarrassing three minutes of fame ever, the two friends must up their game if they’re to expose the conniving Bella, ace their Science project, and learn how an old-fashioned camera they first mistook for a hairdryer might be the answer to their prayers.
“I don’t aspire to be nice. I do what is necessary to get what I want.” Born on the night of the nation’s independence, Gimme Lao is cheated of the honour of being Singapore’s firstborn son by a vindictive nurse. This forms the first of three things Gimme never knows about himself, the second being the circumstances surrounding his parents’ marriage, and the third being the profound (but often unintentional) impact he has on other people’s lives. Talented, determined and focused, young Gimme is confident he can sail the seven seas, but he does not anticipate his vessel would have to carry his mother’s ambition, his wife’s guilt and his son’s secret. Tracing social, economic and political issues over the past 50 years, this humorous novel uses Gimme as a hapless centre to expose all of Singapore’s ambitions, dirty linen and secret moments of tender humanity.
In this illustrated ode to books and reading, literacy and libraries are promoted and celebrated. A little tree and a little boy form a friendship over their love of books. In time, the tree is adorned with every book the little boy reads to the tree. Soon, a whole community of people can enjoy the magnificent tree of spectacular books. But with time, both the tree and the boy grow older. Now the boy is an old man and must say goodbye. What is to become of the grand old tree?
At the turn of the twentieth century, two young men from Palakkad, Puthu and Krishnan, meet aboard a ship bound for Malaya, and strike up an instant connection. Over the next two decades, they set up a restaurant in Singapore selling curry puffs and kopi, become successful, get married and start families. However, Krishnan harbours a dark secret that threatens to destroy the dreams he and Puthu have built together, a secret that only carelessness can reveal…
Meet Abriana Yeo, 13, awkward and friendless. Meet Octavia Wu, a graceful teenage alien with superpowers. Forced to flee her home planet Viridis after an invasion by "The Others", another alien species, Octavia and her parents crash-land in the Singapore heartland. Pretending to be a foreign student, Octavia enters secondary one and befriends Abriana, who then helps her in her quest to find the Anteris, a missing element the alien family needs if they want to return to Viridis to help in the war effort. All the while, the two girls also need to navigate the intricate web of teenage drama at Bukit Timah Secondary Girls’ School (BTSGS), where mean girls thwart their search efforts every step of the way. Behind the adventure, mystery and sci-fi, this middle-grade novel also explores the pertinent issues that teenagers typically deal with in a local school setting—friendship, loyalty, CCAs, homework and bullies. There is also no shortage of excitement and intrigue in this sci-fi and adventure. This is the first in a four-book series, for children aged 10 and above.
It is 1944 in India and Nimita Khosla yearns to attend university to become an engineer, but her parents want a different life for her. As she accepts her fate and marries, religious upheaval is splitting the country and forcing her family to find a new home. In 2014, her granddaughter, molecular biologist Nimita Sachdev, escapes India to run away from the prospect of an arranged marriage. Staking out a future in Singapore, she faces rising anger against immigrants and uncertainty about her new home. Two generations apart, these two women walk divergent paths but face the same quandaries: who are we, and what is home?
While among the most common of Renaissance genres, the epigram has been largely neglected by scholars and critics: James Doelman's book is the first major study on the Renaissance English epigram since 1947. It combines thorough description of the genre's history and conventions with consideration of the rootedness of individual epigrams within specific social, political and religious contexts. The book explores questions of libel, censorship and patronage associated with the genre, and includes chapters on the sub-genres of the religious epigram, political epigram and mock epitaph. It balances discussion of canonical figures such as Ben Jonson and Sir John Harington with a wide range of lesser known poets, drawing on both manuscript and print sources. In its breadth The epigram in England serves as a foundational introduction to the genre for students, and through its detailed case studies it offers rich analysis for advanced scholars.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From a bestselling graphic novelist comes “a hugely ambitious, stylistically acrobatic work” (The New York Times Book Review) that brings us on a uniquely moving, funny, and thought-provoking journey through the life of an artist and the history of a nation. Meet Charlie Chan Hock Chye. Now in his early 70s, Chan has been making comics in his native Singapore since 1954, when he was a boy of 16. As he looks back on his career over five decades, we see his stories unfold before us in a dazzling array of art styles and forms, their development mirroring the evolution in the political and social landscape of his homeland and of the comic book medium itself. With The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, Sonny Liew has drawn together a myriad of genres to create a thoroughly ingenious and engaging work, where the line between truth and construct may sometimes be blurred, but where the story told is always enthralling.