Singapore: Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan

I read most of this on a wet Sunday, absorbed in the goings on of a group of super rich Straits Chinese (Chinese inhabitants of Singapore and Malaysia). This is not high literature. It verges on the women's magazine romance type of story. Rachel is a university professor in New York, with a Singaporean boyfriend Nicholas, also a university professor. He invites her to Singapore to attend his best friend's wedding and meet his family. What she doesn't know is how wealthy they are, and that they have very firm ideas on who Nicholas, the only male grandchild to bear the family surname, might marry.

I have no way of gauging the accuracy of the depiction of the lifestyle of the super rich in Singapore, but it seemed to ring true, and there was an entertaining range of characters. The author neatly sidesteps the fact that some picky readers might check out the possibility of his grandmother's mansion with huge park like grounds on google maps, by having it mysteriously not appear on google maps or on a car's GPS system. There is a good deal of eating in this book - apparently Singaporeans are passionate about food. (I could have done with reading it before a Singapore stopover some years back, to find out before we went where all the best street hawker food was to be found). There is also something of an obsession with designer fashion, and plenty of flash yachts and private jets. A good many footnotes, particularly in the first part of the book, explain Malay and Hokkien names for dishes, slang and abbreviations,and offer witty asides. I did find it better to skip some of the footnotes though, for smoother reading.

About three quarters of the way through, I began to feel rather glutted, as if I had eaten too much of one of the multi course banquets described in the book. And yet, somehow I find myself wanting to read the next in the series, to find out what happens next to Rachel, Nick, Nick's cousin Astrid and the rest of the cast - variously nice and awful.

Kevin Kwan was born and brought up in Singapore (apparently he attended the elite boys school where Nick met his best friend Colin Khoo), and now lives in Manhattan. That's all the background I can find on him on the internet - if some of this story is based on real lives, there would be reason for him to be discreet.