by Goh Kasan
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.
~ Ng Yi-Sheng (Utama, Lion City)
This is an ambitious, highly literate novel. It sweeps the reader away into unfamiliar worlds, and makes familiar ones strange. A current of almost-laughter flows beneath its constantly modulating narrative voice. Its language is fresh, its imagery a panorama of bright and accurate detail. People love each other, rage at each other, feed and protect and betray and abandon each other, yet somehow find each other again in new configurations. It’s a moving and original piece of work, overflowing with life’s crazy, painful sweetness.
~ Helen Garner (How to End a Story, Baillie Gifford Prize 2025)
An unabashed romp full of post-empire camp, and poignant by turns in its longing for home, Kasan Goh’s Billy, Seetoh & Co provides a diasporic counter-perspective to Singapore’s national development story of the Seventies and Eighties.
~ Ann Ang, literary scholar and writer
Goh employs the device of an unreliable narrator who makes free with multiple literary forms: Bildungsroman, dream sequences, epistolary, Chinese epics and poetry.
These authorial tactics, which embed questions on national identity, diaspora and the discourses on East-West power shifts, make this an intellectually satisfying novel.
Together with the multiple allusions to the literatures of Singapore’s main cultural influences, Billy, Seetoh & Co reflects the nature of the story of Singapore told for Singapore and, of course, the world.
I more than liked the novel. I felt a resonance with it. And found myself thinking that Goh’s way might be the only honest way for post-colonials to tell their stories.
Its publication is significant.
~ Chuah Guat Eng (Days of Change, Echoes of Silence)
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.
Size: 225mm x 152mm
Extent: 252 pp
Binding: Paperback
Weight: 330g
ISBN 978-981-17950-3-9
by Goh Kasan
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.
~ Ng Yi-Sheng (Utama, Lion City)
This is an ambitious, highly literate novel. It sweeps the reader away into unfamiliar worlds, and makes familiar ones strange. A current of almost-laughter flows beneath its constantly modulating narrative voice. Its language is fresh, its imagery a panorama of bright and accurate detail. People love each other, rage at each other, feed and protect and betray and abandon each other, yet somehow find each other again in new configurations. It’s a moving and original piece of work, overflowing with life’s crazy, painful sweetness.
~ Helen Garner (How to End a Story, Baillie Gifford Prize 2025)
An unabashed romp full of post-empire camp, and poignant by turns in its longing for home, Kasan Goh’s Billy, Seetoh & Co provides a diasporic counter-perspective to Singapore’s national development story of the Seventies and Eighties.
~ Ann Ang, literary scholar and writer
Goh employs the device of an unreliable narrator who makes free with multiple literary forms: Bildungsroman, dream sequences, epistolary, Chinese epics and poetry.
These authorial tactics, which embed questions on national identity, diaspora and the discourses on East-West power shifts, make this an intellectually satisfying novel.
Together with the multiple allusions to the literatures of Singapore’s main cultural influences, Billy, Seetoh & Co reflects the nature of the story of Singapore told for Singapore and, of course, the world.
I more than liked the novel. I felt a resonance with it. And found myself thinking that Goh’s way might be the only honest way for post-colonials to tell their stories.
Its publication is significant.
~ Chuah Guat Eng (Days of Change, Echoes of Silence)
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.
Size: 225mm x 152mm
Extent: 252 pp
Binding: Paperback
Weight: 330g
ISBN 978-981-17950-3-9
A ‘fiction’ which I had hoped would emerge in Singapore, a fiction in which personal experience / family life provide the impetus within the textures and contexts of society / nation, not as documentaries or mere descriptions, but as articulations touched – and sanctified – by both the power of imagination and the strategies of art.
– Edwin Thumboo
