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Praise
About the Author

In 14 thrilling stories about desire, faith, and ideology, The Unrepentant captures the revolutionary fervor of Malaya at a formative time for Southeast Asia.

In Malaya (present-day Malaysia and Singapore), when the British imposed the Emergency to crush leftist and independence movements, the insurgents fought back with ingenuity and ferocity. The Unrepentant tells the stories of these insurgents who loved, doubted, grieved, and hungered amid a revolution. A guerilla draws a priest into the cause. A translator debates the language of the revolution. A tin miner falls in love. A brother aspires to be Malaysia’s first cosmonaut. An exile returns home.

From the tropical night of the jungle to shophouse flats, in which the war for Malayan liberation was imagined and fought, these intimate stories span the 1940s to the 2010s and challenge archival perspectives of the period, blurring the borders between fiction and fact, history and memory. Braiding together the diverse perspectives of Chinese and Malay communists, Tamil estate laborers, Third World movie-makers, and leftist Christian movements, The Unrepentant pulls the reader into a recent past that still echoes into the present.
“Turning history inside out, Sharmini Aphrodite’s The Unrepentant insinuates itself into the unseen gaps of national narratives, into the mutable space between the established order and the promised revolution. Dark and elliptical, these stories have the feverish allure of half-remembered dreams.”
—Jeremy Tiang, author, State of Emergency

“The Unrepentant delicately portrays the inner lives of ‘Malayan Emergency’ fighters who devoted everything to the dream of a better world. Every character in these stories is deeply felt, every sentence intimately crafted. Sharmini Aphrodite’s poetically raw writing is simultaneously paean and the tenderest manifesto.”
—YZ Chin, author, Edge Case

“In stunning, pitch-perfect prose, Sharmini Aphrodite brings to light the forbidden histories of the freedom fighters erased by the official narratives of the Malaysian and Singaporean nation-states. This is a collection destined to become a classic: it will burn itself into the collective memory of the region with its lyricism, its honesty, and its exquisitely keen yet somehow also oneiric rendering of both place and psychology.”
—Preeta Samarasan, author, Tale of the Dreamer’s Son

“These stories document loss, exile, and forgetting as their characters enter the jungle of a Malayan past and vanish from dominant narratives. Yet they also offer hope through persistent rituals of remembrance and rediscovery enacted by those who remain. In The Unrepentant, memory transgresses boundaries and enters bodies and landscapes, splitting history open, and offering the possibility of imagining new worlds. Its stories are historically grounded, achingly beautiful, and reveal Sharmini Aphrodite as a pathbreaking new talent in Malaysian literature.”
—Philip Holden, author, Heaven Has Eyes

“Inhabited by voices who find themselves on the wrong side of history in postwar Malaya, Sharmini Aphrodite’s debut collection breaks new ground by staking a claim on an internationalist guerrilla mythos for the peninsula. Epic and intimate by turns, The Unrepentant is peopled by Indonesia Raya revolutionaries evading the British authorities, a young Chinese man who joins the armed struggle in the jungle, a woman in love with a married party leader, and their future selves looking back across borders and time, unable to return home. Divisions between races and religions run so deeply, that to love a different person or another vision of the nation is to run the risk of dying to one’s community and history. Dreaming of an unfractured Malaysia, The Unrepentant holds forth the possibility of memory even where no future exists.”
—Ann Ang, literary researcher and writer
Sharmini Aphrodite was born in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, and grew up in Johor Bahru. Her short stories and writing on literature, art, and history have appeared online and in print. She is the editor-in-chief of SUSPECT, a journal of Asian literature and art. She holds an MA in history from Nanyang Technological University and is currently pursuing a joint PhD in Southeast Asian studies (National University of Singapore) and history (King’s College London). Her current academic project focuses on indigeneity, state-making, and more in twentieth-century Sabah, while her research interests include anticolonial movements, agricultural histories, orality, and the history of revolutionary Christianity in the Global South. The Unrepentant is her first longform work, and she is currently working on a novel that brings her back to Sabah.

Authors

The Unrepentant: Short Stories