07 Apr Bestsellers: March 2016

Now here’s a thing. Not one title appearing in the monthly bestsellers’ list for March was on the list for the previous month. Promiscuous tastes – that’s the only way to describe our customers’ buying habits. It will come as no shock to learn that Rehman Rashid’s fine new book, Peninsula: A Story of Malaysia (Fergana), emerged as top of the pops, and that even before last Saturday’s Penang launch. It was joined in the top five by Rehman’s classic A Malaysian Journey – so a hat tip to you, sir! Kua Kia Soong’s excellent collection of essays, Moderates and Extremists in Malaysia (Suaram) benefited from the author’s engaging appearance at one of our Nusantara Forum talks. World Poetry Day was a boon to three Penang-based poets: Yasmin Bathamanathan and Ooi Kee How’s bilingual collection, Found In Translation (Precious Pages Resources), and Cecil Rajendra’s Personal and Profane (Clarity), the best of his work from a 50-year career. Then there are collections by two quite different kinds of lawyers – Azmi Sharom’s Brave New World (SIRD) and Tommy Thomas’s Anything But the Law (SIRD), who, as you’d expect, range far beyond the law itself. Finally, it’s gratifying to see Anthony Burgess’s The Malayan Trilogy (Vintage) doing well, since we will be organising something special for his centenary next year; and even more so with Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto in the delightful Penguin Little Black Classics series, after the hamfisted attempts to stop people even studying the two old revolutionaries. Here’s the full list:

1  Rehman Rashid, Peninsula: A Story of Malaysia (Fergana Arts)
2  Kua Kia Soong, Moderates and Extremists in Malaysia (Suaram)
3  Yasmin Bathamanathan and Ooi Kee How, Found In Translation (Precious Pages Resources)
4  Anthony Burgess, The Malayan Trilogy (Vintage)
5  Rehman Rashid, A Malaysian Journey (RR)
6  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Penguin)
7  Azmi Sharom, Brave New World (SIRD)
8  Tommy Thomas, Anything But the Law: Essays on Politics and Economics (SIRD)
9  A. Shukor Rahman, 101 Stories of Old Penang (Think City)
10 Cecil Rajendra, Personal and Profane (Clarity Publishing)