What are Writers & Reviewers saying about Gus?
Reviews
“…an action-packed, page-turning novel that reveals the author’s fecund imagination of a Singapore which loses control.”
“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.”
“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.”
Read Shawn Hoo’s 4 Star review in The Sunday Times
Singapore Writers
“An ecological dystopian romp, Gus is a warning about the delicate nature of the relationship between man and animal, and how fine the line of distinction can be as well. Gresham has written a zeitgeisty, absurdist tale that will entertain and make youthink.”
Lee Jing-Jing, author of How We Disappeared
“An anarchic romp through a post-apocalyptic, post-human Singapore, this is Planet of the Apes meets The Walking Dead meets The Jungle Book, featuring the nuttiest of characters on jaw-droppingly bloody escapades. A truly one-of-a-kind work of speculative fiction.”
Ng Yi-Sheng, multi-award-winning author of Lion City
“This apocalyptic novel is about the unnervingly near future. What it tells is the riveting friendship between a talking langurand a human clown at the centre of a great revolution in Singapore and, for that matter, Nature. Jon Gresham’s chaotic Darwinian satire is funny and tragic and inserts a vast cast of attractive characters into memorable locales. An utter page-turner, Gus is theproduct of a magnificently troubling imagination that will scare its readers the next time they attempt a hiking trail.”
Gwee Li Sui, poet, graphic artist and literary critic
“A traumatised monkey launches into a quest for home with the help of bewildered humans, in this narrative that never lets upfrom the very first page. Breathless, unrelenting, but also hilarious and unexpectedly poignant, here is a surreal and wildlyentertaining morality tale about what happens when the natural world fulfils its vengeance on modern life as we know it.”
Cyril Wong, award-winning poet and author of This Side of Heaven
“Gresham has written a thought-provoking and entertaining work that hurtles from escapade to escapade with humour and compassion. Activities like eating meat, visiting the zoo and reading news reports about the latest discoveries in the labs at Biopoliswill probably leave one with some degree of disquiet after reading this book.”
Yeo Wei Wei, author of These Foolish Things
A dive into a world at once familiar and unfamiliar. Singapore in the not-too-distant future, where primates have taken over, leaders have fled, and those left behindare forced to navigate a chaotic anarchic world that has stopped listening to nature. Through the eyes of the country’s last Raffles’ banded langur, we see these characters grappling with love, loss and the fine line between ‘us’ and ‘them’. An engaging read that stretches the imagination while it interrogates where we stand when faced with the fearful unknown.”
Pamela Ho, former journalist and co-author of Adventures of 2 Girls
"A sentient Raffles’ banded langur who just wants to go home, a deeply confused accountant who wants to be a clown, a kindly Filipina nurse, these are just some of the strange menagerie of characters in this absurdist, absolutely gonzo, post-apocalyptic book. Creative, propelling – a real pleasure to read (as long as you're not on a dark forested path along Bukit Timah)."
Victor Fernando R Ocampo, author of The Infinite Library and Other Stories