08 Feb January 2017 Bestsellers

JANUARY BESTSELLERS. It’s time to reveal the hot picks for the first month of the new year. One clear theme is the longevity of some of our customers’ favourite books. For the second month running the latest book from Zunar, Wasabi (Wa Sapu Billion) came in at the top of the pile, testimony to the enduring popularity of his work in the face of brazen scandals. Thanks to its official launch in the middle of the month, Zairil Khir Johari’s first-class collection of essays, Finding Malaysia: Making Sense of an Eccentric Nation (SIRD), makes its first appearance on the list – and it really is an important reflection on the state of the nation. And for the third month in a row, the beautifully written memoir of our late friend, Benedict Anderson, A Life Beyond Boundaries (SIRD/Verso), a warm and wise reflection of a life well led, makes the podium. We were very pleased once again to see not one but two of A. Shukor Rahman’s collections of local tales – More Penang Stories and 101 Penang Stories (Think City) – doing well. The other Penang-based title is Mike Gibby’s lavishly illustrated Street Art Penang Style (from our friends at Entreport Publishing), the definitive guide to public art both in George Town and beyond. Three fiction titles make the top ten: Sharon Bakar’s third edited collection, Everything About Us (Word Works), really does contain some delights; Tash Aw’s Five Star Billionaire (Fourth Estate) makes the list for the first time, after his The Harmony Silk Factory frequently featuring; and in the year of his centenary Anthony Burgess’s The Malayan Trilogy (Vintage) finds new readers all the time. Rounding off the list is June Yap’s rigorous Restrospective (SIRD), an important study of the role of history in contemporary art and aesthetics in Malaysia and Singapore. Here’s the full list:

1. Zunar, Wasabi (Wa Sapu Billion)
2. Zairil Khir Johari, Finding Malaysia: Making Sense of an Eccentric Nation (SIRD)
3. Benedict Anderson, A Life Beyond Boundaries (SIRD/Verso)
4. A. Shukor Rahman, 101 Stories of Old Penang (Think City)
5. Sharon Bakar, ed., Everything About Us (WordWorks)
6. Mike Gibby, Street Art Penang Style (Entrepot)
7. Tash Aw, Five Star Billionaire (Fourth Estate)
8. Anthony Burgess, The Malayan Trilogy (Vintage)
9. June Yap, Retrospective: A Historiographical Aesthetic in Contemporary Singapore and Malaysia (SIRD)
10. A. Shukor Rahman, More Penang Stories