--Winner of Singapore Book Awards 2022 (Best Literary Work)-- --Co-Winner of the 2021 Epigram Books Fiction Prize-- In 1890s Singapore, the formidable Miss Leda Cassidy arrives as paid companion to Sarah Jane Bendemeer, whose family suffers under the thrall of Southeast Asia's most terrifying hantu. But there's more to Miss Cassidy than meets the eye, and she's faced down worse in her life than a pontianak. However, she may have met her match in the indefatigable businessman, Mr Kay Wing Tong, whose large and constantly-growing family clearly requires female supervision—especially of the particular kind Miss Cassidy can provide. Ill omens and strange happenings surround Mr Kay and his colourful family, and Miss Cassidy must find a way to defend the ones she has learned to love.

In post-independence Singapore, tradition clashes with modernity in this compelling tale of the importance of defining one's own story. When their father Sujakon comes home late one night, raving about bad people coming to take them away, siblings Zuzu and Hakeem are forced to leave everything behind and live in a tent at Changi Beach, with a secret community called Anak Bumi—the Children of the Earth. Here, they learn to live off the land and fend for themselves, and partake in a communal storytelling ritual under the stars called the Wayang Singa. But just as they’ve acclimatised to their new lives, their father disappears without a word and a strange man washes ashore warning of mortal danger from just offshore.

Behind the golden façade of a land filled with opportunities dwell two destitute souls, shipped to Singapore in the late 1800s. Oseki, an ingenue forced into prostitution as a karayuki, grapples with being betrayed by her own father and transforms into a monster she can’t recognise. Gobind, a deaf convict from India, serves his sentence as a punkhawala to a British hunter obsessed with killing Rimau Satan, a man-eating tiger of mythic proportions. Whenever Gobind hunts with his master, his butchered memories lurk in the darkness, aching to pounce. When Oseki’s and Gobind’s paths intertwine, they begin to face their inner demons to find their humanity—and their way back home.

Hunters are a new breed of criminal. An aberration. Not human, not animal, but a terrifying combination. After a long absence, forensic psychologist Walter Kirino is back with the Hunter Intelligence Division, on the trail of a new Hunter. Following the bodies that the Highway Snatcher leaves behind, Walter is forced to interrogate the question: where is the line between Hunter and human? To find out, he will revisit his traumatic past and throw open the rooms in his mind where his nightmares lay slumbering.

Cassidy's Run is the riveting story of one of the best-kept secrets of the Cold War—an espionage operation mounted by Washington against the Soviet Union that ran for twenty-three years. At the highest levels of the government, its code name was Operation shocker. Lured by a double agent working for the United States, ten Russian spies, including a professor at the University of Minnesota, his wife, and a classic "sleeper" spy in New York City, were sent by Moscow to penetrate America's secrets. Two FBI agents were killed, and secret formulas were passed to the Russians in a dangerous ploy that could have spurred Moscow to create the world's most powerful nerve gas. Cassidy's Run tells this extraordinary true story for the first time, following a trail that leads from Washington to Moscow, with detours to Florida, Minnesota, and Mexico. Based on documents secret until now and scores of interviews in the United States and Russia, the book reveals that: ¸ more than 4,500 pages of classified documents, including U.S. nerve gas formulas, were passed to the Soviet Union in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars ¸ an "Armageddon code," a telephone call to a number in New York City, was to alert the sleeper spy to an impending nuclear attack—a warning he would transmit to the Soviets by radio signal from atop a rock in Central Park ¸ two FBI agents were killed when their plane crashed during surveillance of one of the Soviet spies as he headed for the Canadian border ¸ secret "drops" for microdots were set up by Moscow from New York to Florida to Washington More than a cloak-and-dagger tale, Cassidy's Run is the spellbinding story of one ordinary man, Sergeant Joe Cassidy, not trained as a spy, who suddenly found himself the FBI's secret weapon in a dangerous clandestine war. ADVANCE PRAISE FOR CASSIDY'S RUN "Cassidy's Run shows, once again, that few writers know the ins and outs of the spy game like David Wise. . . his research is meticulous in this true story of espionage that reads like a thriller." —Dan Rather "The Master hsa done it again. David Wise, the best observer and chronicler of spies there is, has told another gripping story. This one comes from the cold war combat over nerve gas and is spookier than ever because it's all true." —Jim Lehrer

When young medusa Ria inadvertently turns an entire village to stone, she and her older sister flee to Nelroote, an underground settlement populated by other non-humans also marginalised by society. There she becomes their gatekeeper, hoping to seek redemption and love…until her friendship with a man from above threatens to dismantle the city she swore to protect.

Eleven-year-old Cassidy has just inherited a gift from her late great-grandmother. Unfortunately, that “gift” turns out to be a summer trapped in etiquette school. What good are manners, anyway, for a girl who dreams of living life on the road as a hobo—er, “knight of the road”? As if trying to remember to keep her elbows off the table isn’t bad enough, Cassidy’s best friend, Jack, suddenly seems more interested in doing chores for the new teenage girl who’s moved in next door than in fishing with Cassidy down by the river. Not even her classic epic pranks seem to be saving Cassidy from having her worst summer ever. It’s time to face facts: growing up stinks. Veteran middle-grade author Sue Stauffacher returns with a cranky, pranky, laugh-out-loud tomboy heroine who might just learn the hard way that manners do matter, and that people can change.

In 2012, author and editor Jason Erik Lundberg released Fish Eats Lion, the first anthology of literary speculative fiction to be published in Singapore, a groundbreaking work that opened the floodgates of acceptability for the genre in the island-nation, forever changing the landscape. Now, a decade later, he returns with Fish Eats Lion Redux, proving that SF is still alive and strong in the Lion City, and exploring Singapore from the distant past to the far future and many points between, as well as alternate versions along the multiverse. With original stories by Meihan Boey, Ng Yi-Sheng, Nuraliah Norasid, Victor Fernando R. Ocampo, Suffian Hakim, Inez Tan, Cyril Wong, Daryl Qilin Yam and many more, this new collection shows beyond doubt that the realm of the imagination has never been so strange or so local.

The Epigram Books Collection of Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume Five gathers the finest Singaporean stories published in 2019 and 2020, selected by guest editor Balli Kaur Jaswal from hundreds published in journals, magazines, anthologies and single-author collections.