The Invisible Manuscript

Alfian Sa’at’s first unpublished collection of writings composed when he was 22, it was first distributed unofficially to selected friends and colleagues. Bearing passionate testimony to private and public memories, this gathering of poems and prose fragments documenting the intimate challenges of homosexual longing gives voice to an invisible minority still struggling to be recognised today. Now published at last, this book, full of fierce confessions, ambivalences and flinty epiphanies, will shock and devastate. Here is an uncompromising confluence of unfulfilled desires wrought through language by one of Singapore’s most outspoken and critical voices.