I couldn’t put down this book without remembering the lessons of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath: that all men are born equal under the sun, and that the owners of the land have no right to legislate the lives of their workers.

In this novel we are faced with an unsparing look at the lives of the increasing armies of the dispossessed.

Tash Aw writes a gruesome, accurate tale of human beings as so much tinder on a bonfire. Where humans are moved like filth across the sea, over borders, to another human dungheap. There is filth, there is cholera, and worst of all, there is indifference. Another brown man dead? So what.

Migrant workers need a voice and a vote in the lands they visit, and the lands they settle in.

Not least the armies of Phillipine women who manage our children as nannies or our elderly as caregivers.

Not least the Mexican and other Latin American men and women who make American beds, pick their fruit, wash their dishes, wipe their children, and weed the gardens of increasingly ungrateful Americans.

Not least the Indians, Bangladeshis, Rohingyas who populate the sweatshops and construction projects of the Middle East and the Far East. ( )

The story of Lee Hock Lye, a convicted murderer as he relates his story, his life before the killing and prison, over several months to Tan Su-Min a doctor in Sociology who wants to understand the circumstances surrounding his case.

It is a strangely compelling and moving tale, beautifully narrated, but very sad and depressing. We never find out what exactly makes him kill a man he didn’t even know, maybe it was just the last straw in a very hard and unfair life. It is a portrayal of poverty and inequality and the crushing of hope. How poverty, prejudice and intolerance destroy people. ( )

This is laid out as a man telling his story to a woman researcher some years after the events told. The chapters of his story are interspersed with short pieces of the two of them in the present. It works as a device, in that it brings you back to the current and constrasts with the past. The narrator was imprisioned for murder and this is his life story to that point. He tells of life growing up as a chinese origin living in Malaysia. They are barely scratching a living and the impact of factory on the village's fishing has a significant role to play in his life. In fact the role of the world beyond the village is surprisingly evident. He talks of imigrants comming from elsewhere to work, and contrasts their position with that of his village, where they are squeezed between the low paying jobs and those using the illegal imigrants as cheap labour.
It is all told with a complete lack of self pity, all very mattter of fact. He tries to tease out the roots of the events and where there were turning points. At one point he does say that seeing options and being able to take them are two different things.
It's quite a bare life, in one sense, but at the same time, the teller never sounds as if he regrets his life. There is a sense of inevitability in the events, as told, that seems to be fated. And yet there are points at which the ending could have changed, but is that the benefit of hindsight or was there ever a point when things could change.
Thought provoking without being lecturing, it certainly makes you think about the impact of global events in small places. It's not clear who the survivors of the title might be. ( )

I lived in Malaysia for three and a half years, a quarter century ago, but the main character is almost a type of the struggling poor ethnic Chinese. I admire much about this novel, but found I didn't like reading it although Aw's writing and characterization carried me along like one of the flood tides he mentions. I relished many of the details of Malaysian life but found I couldn't connect with the woman who records the protagonist's story; she seemed to me like a necessary distraction, a youthful child of privilege to contrast with his impoverished childhood and youth. Maybe there is just too much truth in this novel for me to enjoy reading it. ( )

Beautifully characterised, riveting book about class struggles, racism and thwarted ambitions in contemporary Malaysia. ( )