The best books about Malaysia

Fashion, Passion, Hot Jazz & Murder: Meet Eduard Hall, an odd young man who just happens to fall in love with Mia Waverly, a beautiful ghost from the famous Waverly family, brutally murdered seventy years ago. Though her body was never found. With time running out and through extraordinary forces, they travel back in time to the night of the murders, setting off a chain of events that will change everything. If they can solve the mystery, they may save her and her family, but lose each other forever.

The Flapper Affair is the story of two young lovers crossed by time, space, and an unsolved murder.

Finding Myself in Borneo is an honest and buoyant chronicle of a young Canadian man's adventures during 1968-1970, while teaching secondary school as a CUSO volunteer in Sabah, Malaysia (North Borneo). Travel with Neill McKee on his unique journey through vibrant Asian cultures as he learns the craft of teaching, the Malay language, and local customs, and gains many friends in his small community. He climbs the highest peak in Southeast Asia, has a love affair, and makes his first of many documentary films.

He and his American Peace Corps buddy also discover that North Borneo is, indeed, J. R. R. Tolkien's famed Middle-Earth of The Lord of the Rings! The enterprising duo establishes the North Borneo Frodo Society, an organization Tolkien joins. During McKee's second Sabah sojourn, 1973-74, and other return trips, he tells readers what happened to the land and people who touched his life, and he theirs.

The illuminating and deeply personal debut from Gabriela Maya Bernadett, Stories My Grandmother Told Me is the true story of Esther Small, the great-granddaughter of slaves, who became one of the few Black students to graduate from NYU in the 1940s. Having grown up in Harlem, Esther couldn’t imagine a better place to live; especially not somewhere in the American Southwest. But when she learns of a job teaching Native American children on a reservation, Esther decides to take a chance.

She soon finds herself on a train to Fort Yuma, Arizona; unaware that each year, the Bureau of Indian Affairs kidnaps the native Tohono O’odham children from the reservation and forces them to be educated in the ‘ways of the White man.’ One of two Black people in Fort Yuma, Esther feels isolated, never sure where she belongs in a community deeply divided between the White people and the Tohono O’odhams.

In 1996, during the US Satanic Panic, 16-year-old Audre is having trouble fitting into her new town, where everyone seems to believe there's a Satanic cult in the woods. But when the pastor's daughter—Audre's crush—goes missing, she starts to wonder if the town's obsession with evil isn't covering up something far worse.

Funeral expenses in the United States average more than $10,000. And every year conventional funerals bury millions of tons of wood, concrete, and metals, as well as millions of gallons of carcinogenic embalming fluid. There is a better way, and Elizabeth Fournier, affectionately dubbed the “Green Reaper,” walks you through it, step-by-step. She provides comprehensive and compassionate guidance, covering everything from green burial planning and home funeral basics to legal guidelines and outside-the-box options, such as burials at sea. Fournier points the way to green burial practices that consider both the environmental well-being of the planet and the economic well-being of loved ones.

Gracie Boswell's got a charmed bullet, a brand new posse, and a pack of outlaw vampires to kill.

The tiny town of Penance has a big vampire problem—and charmslinger Gracie Boswell aims to be the solution. A whole nest of vampires makes for a mighty fine bounty, though, and Gracie is far from the only charmslinger angling for the job. When a charming local layabout and an old competitor elbow their way into Gracie's posse, she's forced to at least pretend to play nice...but trust is scarce in the west, and smart bounty hunters always sleep with one eye open.

Robert Kerbeck didn’t grow up wanting to become the world’s greatest corporate spy. He just wanted out of the family car business. An Ivy League education in his back pocket, he had a more noble profession in mind—to be an actor. But to support himself, he needed a survival job. And before he knew it, while his acting peers were waiting tables, Kerbeck was beginning his apprenticeship as a corporate spy. RUSE: Lying the American Dream from Hollywood to Wall Street tells the story of a young man who dreams of stardom but can’t quite shake everything he’s learned growing up in the automobile business. Kerbeck shares the lies he told, the celebrities he screwed, the cons he ran, and the millions he made—and lost—along the way.

Adam de Guirande is Baron Roger Mortimer’s man through and through. So when Mortimer rebels, what can Adam do but ride with him? Unfortunately, a failed rebellion comes with a heavy cost and Edward II is feeling especially vindictive. Adam can only watch as his beloved lord is hauled off to captivity, and as to himself, well, he can already hear the hammering on the gallows. 

Ultimately, only one person can save Adam, but is his wife willing to risk it all for him?

Elen Griffiths has an 18th-century superpower – she is immune to smallpox from her work with the dairy herd, but when Viscount Mordiford, heir to Duntisbourne, is struck down by the ‘red plague’, she is forced to leave her farm and nurse him. Shut away in Duntisbourne Hall she is appalled by the disease but pities Mordiford and learns to treat him. However, a far worse evil lurks in the icy corridors of the Hall, forcing Elen to flee England and join the Duke of Marlborough’s campaign against the French. Reunited with the man she loves on the morning of the Battle of Blenheim, she discovers that the pain of love is nothing compared to the pain of loss.

In Kanazawa, Emmitt’s future plans collapse when his wife, Mirai, suddenly backs out of negotiations to purchase their dream home. Disappointed, he’s surprised to discover her subtle pursuit of a life and career in Tokyo, a city he dislikes. While resisting her efforts to move to Tokyo, Emmitt becomes drawn into the mysterious death thirty years prior of a mutual friend of Mirai’s parents. It is only when he and his father-in-law climb the mountain where the man died that he learns the somber truth and discovers what the future holds for him and his wife.

With an intimacy of emotion inexorably tied both to the cityscape and Japan’s mountainous terrain, Kanazawa reflects the mood of Japanese fiction in a fresh, modern incarnation.