Marshall Cavendish $12.90 

Blending memoir and fiction, Singaporean writer Minfong Ho’s small volume of collected immigrant tales is an intimate affair, much like her previous, award-winning novels Sing to the Dawn and The Clay Marble. Ho, who has lived an itinerant lifestyle herself, shows great empathy for her displaced subjects, starting with personal stories of her childhood as a diplomat’s daughter moving around South-East Asia, and then presenting fictional snapshots of migrants eking out a living in faraway places. Her observations are sharp and humorous, her childself remarks endearing – she comments that there are two occasions when adults speak ‘loudly and solemnly to people I couldn’t see: when my father spoke on the phone to business colleagues, and when my grandmother spoke to the spirit of her dead husband’. The naive voice throughout the anthology works as well (Ho is better known as a writer of children’s books). Humility, hard work and loyalty to family shape Ho’s idealised characters, whom you suspect are closely tied to people she knows in real life: an all-Asian cast of parents suffering, children stuck between two worlds and wise grandparents. Like a simple bowl of rice, Ho’s graceful prose provides the base for other flavours and ingredients to shine.