Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2005
"Malaysian-British Aw makes an impressive contribution to a literature for which Conrad and Maugham are famous in the story of an audacious, successful Malaysian businessman during World War II. In 1940, Lim Seng Chin, 20-year-old descendant of poor, illiterate southern Chinese laborers transported as mine workers by the British in the late nineteenth century, renames himself Johnny Lim after the local film industry's Tarzan. He has an admirable aptitude for machinery but is blamed for mechanical failures, after which, as a shop clerk, he boldly unloads a lot of cheap Chinese gauze and unsellable batik onto a wealthy white customer by convincing her of its (dubious) value. Thereby he launches himself in the Tiger Brand Trading Company, which he buys in 1942 and renames the Harmony Silk Factory. Via Aw's fast-moving prose and shimmering dialogue, which has an odd, affecting noirish manner, three different accounts of Johnny Lim and varying views of historic and personal reality unfold while the Japanese invade, the Communist Party gathers momentum, and alliances are made and broken."

CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:

This book was part of the Contemporary Asian Literature VBB and is travelling to Shroffland now (surface mail).
Happy reading!

Thanks for this, ApoloniaX! I'm sure I'll enjoy reading it.

We don’t learn much about Japan’s empire building in Indo-China in American history, but it is a fascinating part of history. As seen through the eyes of three different characters, the reader gains a new perspective of WWII on the Eastern Front, long before Pearl Harbor.