My Mother Pattu

Finely textured, humane and deeply relevant, these stories of love, loss, and the politics of identity, race, and belonging, challenge comfortable conventions about ourselves

Deeply humane, in turn wry and humorous, the stories in this collection haunt readers with their searing honesty. A woman, deeply in love with her husband, discovers to her anguish that the love of a good man is not enough. A little boy tries hard to hold his family together as his parents’ marriage disintegrates before his eyes. A mother has a poignant yet brutal conversation with God about her severely disabled son. Three young people idealistically reject racial prejudice and stereotyping, only to find that in Malaysia, their future paths are largely determined by ethnicity and privilege. The extent to which a woman will go in her hatred for her daughter’s childhood friend, ends in a violent aftermath.

Meet the extraordinary in ordinary people when they confront the truth of their past and present—and refuse to look away. Authentic and unsentimental, each story celebrates the resilience of the human spirit even as it challenges comfortable conventions about identity, love, family, community, race relations.