When Chellam, the family's rubber-plantation-bred servant girl, is dismissed for unnamed crimes, her banishment is the latest in a series of recent, precipitous losses that have shaken six-year-old Aasha's life. A few short weeks before, Aasha's grandmother Paati passed away under mysterious circumstances and her older sister, Uma, departed for Columbia University--leaving Aasha alone to cope with her mostly absent father, her bitter mother, and her...

"Malaya, 1951. Yun Ling Teoh, the scarred lone survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp, seeks solace among the jungle-fringed tea plantations of Cameron Highlands. There she discovers Yugiri, the only Japanese garden in Malaya, and its owner and creator, the enigmatic Aritomo, exiled former gardener of the emperor of Japan. Despite her hatred of the Japanese, Yun Ling seeks to engage Aritomo to create a garden in memory of her sister, who died...

Grandmother Jah is determined to return to her estranged husband's house years after a brutal murder. Her children and her granddaughter work together to clear out the remnants of the former residents. But, they're still there, lingering in the dead garden and musty, old rooms. Grandmother Jah will not surrender her home to the man that did so much harm in life. Her son, his boyfriend, her daughter, and granddaughter, all must join her in the effort...

"A reluctant medium is about to discover the ties that bind can unleash a dangerous power . . . . When Jessamyn Teoh starts hearing a voice in her head, she chalks it up to stress. Closeted, broke and jobless, she's moving back to Malaysia with her parents - a country she last saw when she was a toddler. She soon learns the new voice isn't even hers, it's the ghost of her estranged grandmother. In life, Ah Ma was a spirit medium, avatar of a mysterious...

The year is 1921. Lesley Hamlyn and her husband, Robert, a lawyer and war veteran, are living at Cassowary House on the Straits Settlement of Penang. When "Willie" Somerset Maugham, a famed writer and old friend of Robert's, arrives for an extended visit with his secretary Gerald, the pair threatens a rift that could alter more lives than one. Maugham, one of the great novelists of his day, is beleaguered: Having long hidden his homosexuality, his...

"Early morning in Jalan Alor, one of the city's red-light and tourist hotspots controlled by the Triads. A junkie's scream of horror and the commotion that follows brings down the police, first a patrol car, and then, after what the officers see, Inspector Mislan and Detective Sergeant Johan from Special Investigations. The body in the duffle bag had been dumped in a back alley. The junkie who found the bag thought he'd hit the jackpot. The rats probably...