Wildlife On Coal Island

Book excerpt: The eleven stories in Wildlife on Coal Island are set on a fictional island located in present-day Malaysia. Coal Island is a place of secrets, gossip and murder. Peopled with characters that simultaneously laugh at life and are broken by it, it is a petri dish for experiments with the darkness that sometimes enters ordinary days and the surprising clarity that comes after suffering. The humans and animals here will linger in your head as you go about your daily chores: an ageing Chinese opera singer and her pet monkey; a self-proclaimed psychic who is convinced that a tsunami is coming; a murderer who finds worldly wisdom in a wandering Malayan tapir; an ex-colonial plantation overseer, battling with the literal and lateral python of his past; an obese supermarket matriarch who talks to bats.