Flowers In The Sky addresses Malaysian bigotry

As a run-up to our 60th Merdeka Day in August, this is the third of a fortnightly 10-part series of articles on Malaysian novels in English, Writing The Nation.

The story is set in an unspecified Malaysian island-town in the late 1970s. It consists of three separate events loosely linked by Mr K, a Ceylonese surgeon. Two of the events take place in his surgery and involve his patients: Hung, a Chinese Buddhist monk who needs a hernia operation, and Ah Looi, a stomach cancer patient.