Commonwealth by Theophilus Kwek PRE-ORDER
Published 29th May 2025. Available for pre-order.
A neighbourhood containing Singapore's oldest public housing estates, a catchphrase for the dream of equitable distribution, the long tail of the British Empire… Dig into the word "Commonwealth' and you will find rich seams of history inches from the surface, each replete with its own conquests and tragedies, faded visions of the future. Commonwealth takes as its starting-point the massive Bukit Ho Swee fire of 1968 – an event as deeply seared into the history of Kwek's family as the nation's own – and traces the scars of the dislocations and relocations that have come before it, and in its wake. While Kwek's earlier books have dealt with questions of personal rootedness (Giving Ground, Ethos Books, 2016) and larger-scale migration and displacement (Moving House, Carcanet, 2020), Commonwealth draws on a wide array of documentary and oral history sources to address upheavals of individual and collective lives within one of the world's most densely populated cities. As its epigraph asserts, this book asserts that every “piece of country matters / for large and simple reasons†(Adrienne Rich).
A neighbourhood containing Singapore's oldest public housing estates, a catchphrase for the dream of equitable distribution, the long tail of the British Empire… Dig into the word "Commonwealth' and you will find rich seams of history inches from the surface, each replete with its own conquests and tragedies, faded visions of the future. Commonwealth takes as its starting-point the massive Bukit Ho Swee fire of 1968 – an event as deeply seared into the history of Kwek's family as the nation's own – and traces the scars of the dislocations and relocations that have come before it, and in its wake. While Kwek's earlier books have dealt with questions of personal rootedness (Giving Ground, Ethos Books, 2016) and larger-scale migration and displacement (Moving House, Carcanet, 2020), Commonwealth draws on a wide array of documentary and oral history sources to address upheavals of individual and collective lives within one of the world's most densely populated cities. As its epigraph asserts, this book asserts that every “piece of country matters / for large and simple reasons†(Adrienne Rich).
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