My earliest reading memory
Marcus Pfister’s The Rainbow Fish, as a four- or five-year-old in Hong Kong. Retrospectively a book with absolutely the wrong message. If your friends are making you peel scales off your body, they’re not your real friends!

My favourite book growing up
Out of the Ashes by Michael Morpurgo – a children’s novel about, of all things, foot-and-mouth disease. It was my first memory of feeling devastated at the end of the book, a feeling I chase in adulthood!

The book that changed me as a teenager
Somerset Maugham’s Collected Short Stories Volume 4. My childhood was shaped by grief, and this morbid collection of stories helped me understand the nature of loss with a little more clarity. And even if it was on colonial terms, it was probably my first time seeing Malaysia, where I grew up, in literature.

The writer who changed my mind
Teju Cole in Tremor, which I read a year ago. As writers, we often have banal lessons thrown at us – about not using adverbs, for example – which can become very ingrained. Another is to show rather than tell, and Cole challenges this notion in Tremor.

The book that made me want to be a writer
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. I’ve always loved writing, but I never considered being a writer. I opted for more “realistic” goals – study science, become a lawyer etc. I basically stopped reading fiction when I went to university, and after I left, I read only nonfiction and “classics” – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Steinbeck. Those books didn’t leave me much room to contemplate my own voice, and so when I turned back to contemporary fiction in adulthood, my world opened up.

The author I came back to
Maggie Nelson. I’m more patient now than I used to be. I’m trying to let go of applying rigid logic to understand everything I read, as if words are a puzzle with a defined solution. I just let the sentences wash over me.

The book I reread
Another Country by James Baldwin. I first picked it up after reading a stack of contemporary novels which I felt sacrificed feeling to brandish intellect. Baldwin’s work is a real antidote to that: it’s always rich in heart and mind, prescient yet human.

The book I could never read again
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind. As a teenager, I was drawn to all the big words, but now I think everything about this book is simply too much!

The book I discovered later in life
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto.

The book I am currently reading
Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter.

My comfort read
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. There are so many complete lives in this novel, which could also be described as a set of interweaving stories. I would put it in a time capsule for whatever civilisation follows ours.