4 Star Review in The Sunday Times
A big thank you to Shawn Hoo for a wonderful 4 Star review of Gus in The Sunday Times on 16 June 2024.
Some key quotes:
“Chatty and precocious Gus is the compelling voice which threads the novel. It is a fascinating hybrid of a voice which manages to reference the whole gamut of cultural works from the Harry Potter series to the late Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer.
Thoroughly localised and well-read from hanging out in human environments, although in admittedly literary ones...”
“The novel is, most fascinatingly, a marvellous geography of Singapore’s urban and gardened landscape.
Gresham has created a compelling speculative setting around Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, Clementi Forest, the Rail Corridor, Blair Road and other locales, populating a world with multi-species life that allows the non-human to narrate the city.
It is an action-packed, page-turning novel that reveals the author’s fecund imagination of a Singapore which loses control.”
“In part, this can be read as a parable about climate change and the complete inversion of human-animal dynamics. On the other hand, it can also be understood as a pandemic novel, revealing how human domination is already complicit in the making of a less habitable world for all planetary life.
The recent excitement around the sighting of a Raffles’ banded langur on the Eco-Link@BKE shows a nation’s collective fascination with animal life amid this human-controlled city. Gresham’s timely novel is an imaginative glimpse into a beloved creature’s world and Singaporeans’ collective fantasies about living in a City in Nature.”