The Great Reclamation
On a quiet moonlit night, Ah Boon, young and terrified, takes his first trip out to sea in his father’s fishing boat – a rite of passage for the boys of the kampong. As the air hums and the wind howls across the waves, a mysterious, impossible island materialises in the darkness; an island, bountiful with fish, that Ah Boon soon learns only he has the ability to find. But this is only the beginning of the story, and as Ah Boon grows up, alongside Siok Mei, the spirited girl he has fallen in love with, he finds himself caught in the tragic sweep of Singapore’s history. When the Japanese army invades, the resistance rises, and their small nation hurtles towards rebirth, the kampong and the impossible islands that surround it are thrown into jeopardy, and the two friends must decide who they will become – and what they are willing to give up.
Excerpt
Decades later, the kampong would trace it all back to this very hour, waves draining the light from this slim, hungry moon. Decades later, they would wonder what could have been had the Lees simply turned back, had some sickness come upon the father manning the outboard motor, or some screaming fit befallen the youngest, forcing them to abandon the day's work and steer their small wooden craft home. Decades later, they would wonder if any difference could have been made at all.
Or would past still coalesce into present: The uncle dying the way he did, an outcast burned to blackened bone in a house some said was never his anyway. The kampong still destroyed, not swallowed whole by the waves in accordance with some angry god's decree, as the villagers had always feared, but taken to pieces and sold for parts by the inhabitants themselves. If the little boy, the sweetest, most sensitive boy in the kampong, would nevertheless have become a man who so easily bent the future to his will. Perhaps he would have; perhaps this had nothing to do with the hour, the boat, the sea, and everything to do with the boy. But these questions could only be asked after the wars had been fought and the nation born and the sea—once thought of as dependable, eternal—stopped with ton upon ton of sand. These questions would not occur to anyone until the events had fully passed them by, until there was nothing to be done, all were fossils, all was calcified history.
For now, though, the year was still 1941, the territory of Singapore still governed by the Ang Mohs as it had been for the past century, and the boy, very little, very afraid, still crouched in the back of his father's fishing boat.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rachel Heng
Rachel Heng is the author of two novels, most recently The Great Reclamation (Riverhead, 2023), which won the New American Voices Award and was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence, the Joyce Carol Oates Award, the Dublin Literary Award and the HWA Gold Crown Award. The Great Reclamation was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a best book of 2023 by The New Yorker, TIME, Town and Country and Amazon Books. Rachel's short fiction has been published in The New Yorker, McSweeney's Quarterly, Best Small Fictions, Best New Singaporean Short Stories. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic and Esquire. She is an Assistant Professor in English at Wesleyan University.
Short Notes with Rachel Heng
What does "Mata Hati | 心眼 | Eye of the Heart | மனக்கண் வழியே" mean to you in writing?
To write something truthful, which is the hardest thing.
What does your writing process look like? Do you type or write? Are there multiple drafts, long pauses, or sudden bursts of activity?
When working on an early draft, I try to write every morning for several hours. I tend to aim for a loose word count but what's more important is spending time with the work each day, staying in the world and voice, thinking about the characters who inhabit it. Later, my process depends on what the book requires. This may be a complete re-writing from scratch--so a brand new draft--or moving pieces around, or stepping away from it altogether to work on something else, while I figure out what needs to be done next. I'd say there is no standard process, I have to meet each project and each stage of the project on its own terms, which is both the ongoing challenge and beauty of writing fiction.
What does your working space look like?
I am fortunate to have, at home in New York, a small office cluttered with my books, printouts of drafts, random art, and a tiny window with a view of the Hudson River. That is my official 'working space', but I also have an energetic toddler determined to extract me from it! Which means more often than not, I work from anywhere I can snatch time and quiet--I like to work from different cafes or libraries, or on the train.
Make an elevator pitch for your shortlisted work in 30 words or less.
It is a love story, not only romantically, but in the sense of dealing with all kinds of love: that of one's family, one's community, one's land, one's country. And like all love stories it deals with big things: sacrifice, contradiction, conviction, regret, choice.
Could you share a pivotal moment as you were writing this work?
I had started on a first draft written in a very realist historical narrative vein, back in 2018. I had about 10,000 words and was really struggling with it. It felt like I was narrating a chapter from a Social Studies textbook, for lack of a better description. Then I happened to attend a Q&A session with Amy Hempel, an incredible writer, who was visiting the MFA program I was in at the time. I asked her what I should do if I was bored of what I was writing, thinking, like the industrious Singaporean student I was, that the answer would be to plow on, plow through, keep going, suffer through it. Instead she looked at me with this bemused smile and said: "You should probably stop. If it's boring you, imagine what it's going to do to the reader." And that was the permission I needed to ditch that draft, that narrative voice altogether, to go for something weirder, bigger, something that got at what I felt was the surreal nature of the 'Singapore story'.
If you could give one advice to yourself when you were writing this book, what would it be?
Keep the faith!