Description
Praise
About the Author

- Winner of Best Fiction Title for Singapore Book Awards (2016)
- Winner of the Singapore Literature Prize for Fiction (2014)
- Selected by The Business Times as a Top 10 Singapore book from (1965–2015)
- Shortlisted for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s Internationaler Literaturpreis
- Shortlisted for the Frankfurt Book Fair’s LiBeraturpreis
- Longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award (2014)
Meet an over-the-hill pop yé-yé singer with a faulty heart; two conservative middle-aged women holding hands in the Galápagos, and the proprietor of a Laundromat with a penchant for Cantonese songs of heartbreak. Find out the truth about racial riot fodder-girl Maria Hertogh, now living out her days as a chambermaid in Lake Tahoe; a mirage of the Merlion as a ladyboy working Orchard Towers; and a high-stakes fantasy starring the still-suave lead of the 1990s TV hit serial, The Unbeatables.

Ministry of Moral Panic is an extraordinary collection and the introduction of a revelatory new voice. Heartfelt and sexy, the stories of Amanda Lee Koe encompass a skewed world fraught with prestige anxiety, moral relativism, sexual frankness, and the improbable necessity of human connection. Told in strikingly original prose, these are stories that plough the possibilities of understanding Singapore and her denizens.
“This is possibly the most exciting debut collection of stories by a Singapore writer I’ve ever read. Amanda Lee Koe has a breathtaking range. Like crystals, the stories are prismatic but also jagged. Sometimes they deal with uncomfortable subject matter, like rape, or challenging characters, like a self-mutilating, sexually precocious girl. But this is a writer who takes risks. This is the kind of book that will get under your skin because the author herself has spent devoted hours under her characters’.”
—Alfian Sa’at, author of Malay Sketches

“Our winning entry was a unanimous choice, a highly original voice in Singapore writing that we wish to acknowledge and encourage.”
—Dr Meira Chand, chief judge for English Fiction, Singapore Literature Prize 2014

“It’s tempting to label Lee Koe a Singaporean Murakami. Her stories, while set in our very familiar city-state, transcend time and space. Clearly, she’s forging not just a distinctive literary voice for Singapore’s contemporary condition, but also a different path for a new generation of writers who will take Singapore fiction to its next chapter.”
—Pamela Ho, The A List

“There is a deftness of touch, a sureness of intent, a knowingness of accomplishment that makes it hard to believe that Ministry of Moral Panic is Amanda Lee Koe’s first book of fiction. She has marked out in virgin territory a realm of her own, a kingdom of weird, non-conforming, stubborn passions in Singapore. And she has done so without resorting to the usual pieties of understanding and tolerance. She has looked directly at the contorted subject and drawn every contortion that she could see... the collection is eminently readable. I should know. I read it straight through, all fourteen stories, on my flight from Singapore to New York. I had not been able to read on a plane for a while. Too uncomfortable and distracted. But these stories carried me to the end.”
—Koh Jee Leong, author of The Pillow Book

“A magnificent collection of short stories that are as formally innovative as they are profoundly human, compassionate and insightful.”
—Huzir Sulaiman, author of Eight Plays
Amanda Lee Koe was the youngest winner of the Singapore Literature Prize for the story collection Ministry of Moral Panic (Epigram, 2014). It was longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and shortlisted for the Frankfurt Book Fair's LiBeraturpreis and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt's International Literature Prize.

Her novel, Delayed Rays of a Star (Doubleday, 2019) was named a Most Anticipated Title by ELLE, Los Angeles Times, Thrillist, and USA Today, and one of NPR’s Best Books of The Year. She was previously fiction editor of Esquire Singapore.

Ministry of Moral Panic