The harmony silk factory - Tash Aw (First edition)

Tash Aw’s extraordinary first novel, juxtaposes three accounts of a crucial and haunting episode in the history of a Malaysian Chinese family.

This is the story of Johnny Lim — textile merchant, petty crook, and inventor of the Amazing Toddy Machine — and his marriage to Snow Soong, the most beautiful woman in the Kinta Valley.

In 1940, with the Japanese threatening to invade, Johnny and Snow embark upon their honeymoon, recounted in Snow’s captivating journal, to the mysterious Seven Maiden Islands, accompanied by a mercurial Japanese professor and Peter Wormwood, an Englishman adrift.

Many years later, Wormwood looks back on this defining journey, while Snow’s only son goes in search of the truth of his mother and the infamous Chinaman she married.