28 Dec Self, Reality and Truth

There’s no doubt that Chuah Guat Eng possesses one of the most distinctive and accomplished voices in contemporary Malaysian English-language literature. When she visited the bookshop recently she offered – quietly and authoritatively – a sense of her quest to understand the world around us: How do we know what we know? Her two novels and two collections of short stories, published by her under the imprint Holograms, all explore “how our physical senses, our minds and the way we use language influence the way we construct our concepts of self, reality and truth”. The first novel, Echoes of Silence (1994) and then Days of Change (2010), its sequel, offer very personal stories of self-discovery set against the often fraught and fractured attempt to (re)create identity and belonging. Her two collections, The Old House (2008) and the newly published Dream Stuff (2014) show Guat’s mastery of the short story – some of the sharpest and smartest of small but perfectly formed works of fiction. A voice worth discovering.