Reading List
Tash Aw
Novelist
Tash Aw was born in Taipei to Malaysian parents, raised in Kuala Lumpur, and studied law in Britain before writing The Harmony Silk Factory, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Five Star Billionaire and We, the Survivors followed, along with the family memoir Strangers on a Pier. His work returns to class, migration and the distance between the Malaysia he grew up in and the way it gets described elsewhere.
01
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The Line of Beauty
by Alan Hollinghurst · 2004 · Fiction
“I knew this would be an instant classic the moment I read it. It tells of a man navigating class, sexuality, and capitalism in the cruel, heady days of Margaret Thatcher's Britain. One of the most important English novels of all time.” — via Article
02
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Uncle Vanya
by Anton Chekhov · 1897 · Drama
“It's the most affecting story of thwarted ambition and longing.” — via Article
03
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The Lover
by Marguerite Duras · 1984 · Fiction
“It tells of an affair in colonial Vietnam between a 15-year-old French schoolgirl and a wealthy Chinese man twice her age. It is an intense, evocative, and unsettling reading experience, and a master class in how to enmesh memoir and fiction.” — via Article
04
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Beloved
by Toni Morrison · Fiction
“This has to be the angriest, most haunting novel about racism, exclusion, and the sacrifices one makes for love and family.” — via Article
05
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Giovanni’s Room
by James Baldwin
“But there's so much packed into such a slim volume: discrimination, exclusion, desire, the denial of the self.” — via Article