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Sunny Singh explores cost of conflicts with compassion in short story collection

The Straits Times

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September 07, 2025

India-born writer and academic Sunny Singh's Refuge: Stories Of War (And Love) presents 10 brief but affecting stories that serve as "homage to the grace of victims and survivors caught up in wars not of their own making".

- Dave Chua

REFUGE: STORIES OF WAR (AND LOVE) By Sunny Singh Fiction/Footnote Press/ Paperback/189 pages/$29.95 ★★★★☆

Singh is committed to exploring the human cost of conflict through intimate character studies rather than battlefield narratives.

The novelist and professor approaches war literature with distinctive restraint, deliberately avoiding graphic violence to focus instead on the psychological landscapes of those shaped by war and trauma. Her prose is precise and economical, weaving together voices from different generations that encompass both victims and perpetrators of conflicts.

The collection's geographic and temporal settings often remain deliberately ambiguous, requiring readers to piece together clues about location and context. While some stories clearly centre on the Indian subcontinent and conflicts, others exist in a more universal landscape of war's aftermath.

MEER VERHALEN VAN The Straits Times

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