RIPPLES and Other Stories
SynopsisPlot
This polyphonic collection of twenty-five stories presents a multitude of Malaysian perspectives spanning age, gender, and class. Yow char kwai hawkers compete for customers on a busy city street. Marital dynamics unfurl at an abortion clinic. On an island, a man's infatuation with a veiled woman takes a supernatural turn. A woman writes to her brother about their dead cat. Characters in these stories connect through chance encounters and fateful events. Their narratives are inevitably coloured by the social tension and occasional absurdities of a multicultural society.
Story
About this book
RIPPLES and Other Stories collects twenty-five short stories by the Malaysian writer Shih-Li Kow. The pieces move across different corners of Malaysian life, shifting between busy city streets, clinics, islands, and small domestic rooms. Characters vary widely in age, gender, and social class, and the book takes its energy from that range of voices rather than from one continuous plot or a single narrator.
Hawkers selling yow char kwai, the fried dough sticks eaten at Malaysian breakfast stalls, compete for customers on a crowded street. A married couple's dynamic becomes visible at an abortion clinic. In another piece, a woman's letter to her brother concerns their cat, now dead. On an island, a man's infatuation with a veiled woman turns toward the supernatural.
Chance meetings and fateful events connect people across the book, and the frictions of a society made from many communities, along with its absurdities, colour much of what happens. The collection was shortlisted for the 2009 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize, an award given in Cork, Ireland, for single-author story collections written in English.
