Tash Aw was born in Taipei to Malaysian-Chinese parents and grew up in Kuala Lumpar. He moved to England at 18 to attend university, where he studied Law at Cambridge and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He first began work on The Harmony Silk Factory (2005) in the evenings and at weekends until, in 2002, he left his job as a lawyer to work on the novel full time. It was finished a year later, nearly five years after Aw began the book. The Harmony Silk Factory won the 2005 Whitbread First Novel Award and a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Novel, as well as being long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Tash Aw is now a full time writer. His second novel Map of the Invisible World, set in post independence Malaysia and Indonesia, will be published in May 2009.
Visit Tash Aw's Website
Read an excerpt from The Harmony Silk Factory
Read Time magazine's review of The Harmony Silk Factory
BOOKS
The Harmony Silk Factory
Set in Malaysia in the 1930s and 40s, with the rumbling of the Second World War in the background and the Japanese about to invade, The Harmony Silk Factory is the story of four people: Johnny, an infamous Chinaman – a salesman, a fraudster, possibly a murderer – whose shop house, The Harmony Silk Factory, he uses as a front for his illegal businesses; Snow Soong, the beautiful daughter of one of the Kinta Valley’s most prominent families, who dies giving birth to one of the novel’s narrators; Kunichika, a Japanese officer who loves Snow too; and an Englishman, Peter Wormwood, who went to Malaysia like many English but never came back, who also loved Snow to the end of his life. A journey the four of them take into the jungle has a devastating effect on all of them, and brilliantly exposes the cultural tensions of the era. Haunting, highly original, The Harmony Silk Factory is suspenseful to the last page.
'A fine, strong, confident novel -- and what a storyteller Tash Aw is. Unputdownable’ Doris Lessing
'The Harmony Silk Factory is an utterly remarkable debut. It's a dream of a novel, lovely and exquisite and intense, and reveals Tash Aw's already prodigious gift for storytelling; this young writer has come to us fully formed, and with the promise of a long and significant career.' Chang-rae Lee
'Absorbing … a rich, intense novel … The strength of Tash Aw's writing can be seen in the three narratives. Each voice is distinct and each offers a subtly different viewpoint, remaking the material afresh … The beauty and danger of nature are everywhere in this delicately drawn novel' TLS
Map of the Invisible World
During their years together in the orphanage Johan keeps a constant vigil over his little brother Adam - he's all he's got. But they are placed in different adoptive homes and lose all contact. Johan is taken to Kuala Lumpur by a wealthy Malaysian couple, to a life of smart restaurants and expensive cars, whilst Adam remains in Indonesia where he is adopted in by a Dutch painter, Karl, and finds himself growing up in a simple coastal town. Adam often thinks of his brother, but as the years pass, the memories become less painful, and he adapts to his new life. However, in the summer of 1964 unrest is in the air as post-colonial Indonesia slides gradually towards civil war. Foreigners, and especially the Dutch, are treated with increasing hostility. When Karl is arrested, sixteen-year-old Adam resolves to do all that he can to find him. He makes his way to an old friend of Karl's in Jakarta who agrees to help, but in the volatile atmosphere of the capital, and lured by the promise of help to find his brother, Adam quickly falls in with a dangerous crowd and is swept up in events that reach far beyond his understanding…. A worthy successor to highly-acclaimed The Harmony Silk Factory, Map of the Invisible World is a touching tale of love and loss, friendships and belonging, and the indissoluble ties of family.