Siriworn Kaewkan, The Murder Case of Tok Imam Storpa Karde, 2006

There are very few novels that explore the separatist terrorism affecting the three small Thai provinces that border Malaysia, and this one, shortlisted for the 2006 SEA Write Award, quickly became required reading that year with an English translation following four years later. So who killed the much-loved imam in the small village of Tanyong Baru, right outside his own mosque? Terrorists or State officials? Soldiers or police? Is there a suspicious connection with a neighbouring Buddhist village? And why are the villagers closing their doors to an actual investigation? The reader’s guess is as good as anyone elses, which indicates the clever structure of this tale of deflections and half-truths that inevitably views the subject from an outsider’s perpective yet at the same time lets the story’s participants speak (seemingly, often less than thruthfully) for themselves. Kaewkan simply provides the necessary pieces to the jigsaw then lets the readers assemble it in a way that indicates there’s an inevitable collective madness going on here. There are a number of possible courses of events discernable if this short novel is read closely, which is easily done in one sitting – just don’t expect a straightforward whodunnit.

Alex Berenson, The Faithful Spy, 2006

An embedded US spy within Al Qaeda converts to Islam, but is then sent back to the US to carry out a terrorist mission as a test of his loyalty. Extrapolated from Al-Qaeda’s ambitions of nuclear and biological terrorism, Kirkus Reviews described this as “a thriller worthy of le Carré”, but there is too much missing for it to truly deserve such a comparison: le Carré would be far more oblique about American paranoia over terrorism than Berenson, who doesn’t get too distracted with the awkward questions – Guantánamo, torture, the Iraq mess – before he quickly drops them. These issues are the huge elephant in the room that are studiously avoided for the sake of the book’s upbeat pace, and Berenson (a New York Times Iraq correspondent) may have done better by also addressing these nagging issues with a more journalistic eye. Nevertheless, a very confident debut.  PY

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