My Mother Pattu, Saras Manickam
My Mother Pattu, Saras Manickam
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My Mother Pattu

Author: Saras Manickam

Narrator: Ellie Flory Fawcett

Unabridged: 6 hr 22 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/01/2024

Synopsis

Deeply humane, in turn wry and humorous, the stories in this collection haunt readers with their searing honesty.Lalitha, abused by her own mother, learns that bullies carry emotional traumas that scar everyone’s lives.Shiva Das confronts the truth of his own culpability when his adult special child dies in tragic circumstances.A woman, deeply in love with her husband, discovers to her anguish that the love of a good man is not enough.A little boy tries hard to hold his family together as his parents’ marriage disintegrates before his eyes.A mother has a poignant yet brutal conversation with God about her severely disabled son.Three young people idealistically reject racial prejudice and stereotyping, only to find that in Malaysia, their future paths are largely determined by ethnicity and privilege.The extent to which a woman will go in her hatred for her daughter’s childhood friend, ends in a violent aftermath.An Indonesian maid realizes that the money she sends home has become more important than her own welfare or safety to her family.A racial slur triggers reflections on friendship, identity, the loss of belonging and trust in a multi-racial community.Meet the extraordinary in ordinary people when they confront the truth of their past and present – and refuse to look away. Authentic and unsentimental, each story celebrates the resilience of the human spirit even as it challenges comfortable conventions about identity, love, family, community and race relations.

About The Author

An award-winning writer, Saras Manickam's story, 'My Mother Pattu' won the regional prize for Asia in the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Contest. In 2021, it was included in the anthology, The Art and Craft of Asian Stories, published by Bloomsbury, and in 2022, it was published in The Best of Malaysian Short Fiction in English 2010-2020. Saras Manickam worked as a teacher, teacher-trainer, copywriter, Business English trainer, copy-editor, and writer of textbooks, school workbooks and coffee-table books while writing short stories at night. Her various work experiences enabled insights into characters, and life experiences, shaping the authenticity which marks her stories. She also won the 2017 DK Dutt Award for her story, 'Charan'. Some of her other stories have appeared in Silverfish and Readings from Readings anthologies, while one was shortlisted for the 2021 Masters Review Summer Short Story Award. She lives and works in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Arunaa on May 27, 2023

Devoured the whole book in one night. Loved each story so much. ‘My Mother Pattu’ is here to stay for a long time. An anthology of 14 short evocative stories. A few stories stand out more from the others because of their stinging narrative mainly by the women-centric characters. The microcosms are b......more

Goodreads review by Khai Jian (KJ) on December 26, 2023

"Hate feels comfortable, a nurturing place to be in when the hater is a victim. I don't want to be a victim. I don't want to dine out on my displacement in my own country. I don't want my life to be a banality of hate and despair, regret and nostalgia. I don't want to open the door to those beasts b......more

Goodreads review by Meg on May 23, 2023

this is a collection of short stories about all walks of life in malaysia, we see and hear different voices, different perspectives, but there is not many happy endings. it is about struggling to even stay afloat, rioting covertly against the injustice and racial prejudice, and a lot of trauma left......more

Goodreads review by Riti on June 03, 2023

My Mother Pattu is a collection of 14 short stories that are narrated from the perspective of the different diaspora in Malaysia, be it Indians who may have arrived in Malaysia few generations ago or maids who may have come on work from Indonesia or migrant workers from Bangladesh or a host of Chine......more

Goodreads review by litwithneha ( on June 02, 2023

SYNOPSIS A collection of 14 short stories based on immigrant Indians and Chinese in Malaysia, casteism, infidelity, family dynamics etc. #bookhoarderreviews Short stories are a great way to get back the reading mojo in case of a prolonged reading slump. This book with its fourteen brilliantly written s......more

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