Launch of Billy, Seetoh & Co, a novel by Kasan Goh (FREE TICKETS)

FREE TICKETS

LAUNCH of a novel by Kasan Goh that could be a candidate for the great Singaporean novel.

Billy, Seetoh & Co is Kasan Goh’s semi-autobiographical first novel about immigrants – forced and voluntary – who seek a home and belonging.

Billy Chan, a Singaporean student, arrives in Thatcher’s Britain only to be shipwrecked when his family goes bankrupt and flee their homeland in disgrace. From Canada, they cast him thin lifelines.

Billy is befriended by Seetoh, a boy from Ipoh who hatched a plan to escape his country life. Together with a ragtag posse of other migrant friends they – and Billy’s exiled family – struggle to find their own safe harbours.

Review by Ng Yi-Sheng (Utama, Lion City)

An extraordinary new work, brimming with raw energy yet polished with the weight of experience – as befits the longform fiction début of an author in his 60s.

Goh brings to life the world and perspectives of 1980s Singapore, “the island shaped like Aladdin’s lamp”, with a playful, polyglot, jazzy prose that hovers on the brink of magical realism, bringing together nostalgia, history (both personal and political), myth and dreams in a manner hitherto unseen in our nation’s literature.

Ambitious, transnational, sexy and genre-smashing, this really could be a candidate for the great Singaporean novel.