“Turning history inside out, Sharmini Aphrodite’s The Unrepentant insinuates itself into the unseen gaps of national narratives, into the mutable space between the established order and the promised revolution. Dark and elliptical, these stories have the feverish allure of half-remembered dreams.”
—Jeremy Tiang, author, State of Emergency

“These stories document loss, exile, and forgetting as their characters enter the jungle of a Malayan past and vanish from dominant narratives. Yet they also offer hope through persistent rituals of remembrance and rediscovery enacted by those who remain. In The Unrepentant, memory transgresses boundaries and enters bodies and landscapes, splitting history open, and offering the possibility of imagining new worlds. Its stories are historically grounded, achingly beautiful, and reveal Sharmini Aphrodite as a pathbreaking new talent in Malaysian literature.” — Philip Holden, author, Heaven Has Eyes

“Inhabited by voices who find themselves on the wrong side of history in postwar Malaya, Sharmini Aphrodite’s debut collection breaks new ground by staking a claim on an internationalist guerrilla mythos for the peninsula. Epic and intimate by turns, The Unrepentant is peopled by Indonesia Raya revolutionaries evading the British authorities, a young Chinese man who joins the armed struggle in the jungle, a woman in love with a married party leader, and their future selves looking back across borders and time, unable to return home. Divisions between races and religions run so deeply, that to love a different person or another vision of the nation is to run the risk of dying to one’s community and history. Dreaming of an unfractured Malaysia, The Unrepentant holds forth the possibility of memory even where no future exists.” —Ann Ang, literary researcher and writer