-
Access Our
Most Anticipated
Books of 2025!
Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Book Reviewed by:From the author of The Harmony Silk Factory and Five Star Billionaire, a compelling depiction of a man's act of violence, set against the backdrop of Asia in flux.
Ah Hock is an ordinary man of simple means. Born and raised in a Malaysian fishing village, he favors stability above all, a preference at odds with his rapidly modernizing surroundings. So what brings him to kill a man?
This question leads a young, privileged journalist to Ah Hock's door. While the victim has been mourned and the killer has served time for the crime, Ah Hock's motive remains unclear, even to himself. His vivid confession unfurls over extensive interviews with the journalist, herself a local whose life has taken a very different course. The process forces both the speaker and his listener to reckon with systems of power, race, and class in a place where success is promised to all yet delivered only to its lucky heirs.
An uncompromising portrait of an outsider navigating a society in transition, Tash Aw's anti-nostalgic tale, We, the Survivors, holds its tension to the very end. In the wake of loss and destruction, hope is among the survivors.
If this book has one failing, it's the overly languid pace; this isn't a book that necessarily gets its hooks in the reader from the onset. Without much of a narrative to propel the story forward, it's easy to set it down and not feel compelled to pick it right back up. However, with its sharp social commentary and eventual emotional payoff, it rewards perseverance...continued
Full Review
(527 words)
This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access,
become a member today.
(Reviewed by Rachel Hullett).
Tash Ah's We, the Survivors is centered around a Malaysian man who has recently been released from prison, where he served time for murdering a Bangladeshi migrant worker.
Malaysia and Bangladesh are two Southeast Asian countries that have enjoyed a long and mostly amicable history; records show that Bengalis (native to Bangladesh) settled in Malaysia as early as the 15th century, and according to Bangladeshi politician Salahuddin Ahmed in his book Bangladesh: Past and Present, Malaysia was one of the first countries to recognize the independence of Bangladesh in 1972. A trade report issued by the Bangladeshi government in 2012 declared that trade between the two countries was valued at $1.2 billion USD, and according to a report by ...
This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.
If you liked We, the Survivors, try these:
by Deepak Unnikrishnan
Published 2017
Until now, the humanitarian crisis of the so-called "guest workers" of the Gulf has barely been addressed in fiction. With his stunning, mind-altering debut novel Temporary People, Deepak Unnikrishnan delves into their histories, myths, struggles, and triumphs.
by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Published 2016
Winner of 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. A startling debut novel featuring one of the most remarkable narrators of recent fiction: a conflicted subversive and idealist working as a double agent in the aftermath of the Vietnam War
These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Edmund White, author of The Unpunished Vice
The ironically-titled We, the Survivors is the story of billions of human beings today?but not one reader. This is the tale of poor people?refugees, day laborers?whose lives are ruled by cruel circumstance and extreme poverty, whose struggles end in defeat, who are not meant to survive. What would be abstract in a report is here given burning, lacerated flesh. In the twenty-first century it is our Everyman, alas.
