From 1 March 2026, eligible SingLit books may be bought with Culture Pass.
Our bookshop is a portal not just to contemporary publications, but can be thought of as a spring that founts from an otherwise invisible aquifer of Kampong Gelam’s religious scholarship, of storytelling, of speaking truth to power, and of thinking together. A bookshop is so much more than the sum of its books: it is an anchor for a community of readers.
As December comes to a close, we cap another year of reading and another year of providing good books to our reading community with a roundup of ten of the best of 2025.
This year, it gives us booksellers immense pleasure to announce that by popular vote, the 2025 Wardah Readers’ Choice is Why Palestine.
Discussion in a book club circle about mental health experiences, recovery, and the book at hand adds layers of resonance, relatability, a shared human experience, and feelings of being understood.
If you put people with common purpose in a room, they become comrades very quickly, especially after trading war stories. With all the reports of closures and downsizings, Singapore's independent bookshops were not having a good year in 2024. We needed to come together, if nothing else, for solidarity and to rebalance our thinking. During the course of the discussion that night, we realised that we needed to cooperate in some way.
Adult Singaporeans need to come home to reading, otherwise they will lose the skills they honed at school. Change is possible. We only have to look to Islamic history to see how the moment of Iqra brought about an efflorescence of learning and literacy to a culture that had not placed that much value on learning and knowledge during the Jahili Period.
