JANET TAY is a Tin House Winter Workshop alum, and her short stories and journalistic pieces on literature, food and parenting have appeared in various collections and magazines. The first act of her full-length play Reunion was longlisted for the Windsor Fringe Kenneth Branagh Award for New Drama Writing. She lives in Kuala Lumpur with her husband and son. Early Mornings at the Laksa Café is her debut novel.
Every morning before sunrise, Lim Ah Hock opens the shutters of his small kitchen on Carpenter Street, lights an incense stick and prepares the best laksa soup in all of Kuching. According to Lim family legend, the laksa’s secret ingredient – their ancestral broth – was given to them by a deity, who promised the family prosperity as long as the broth is passed down through the generations.
‘Deeply comforting and nourishing . . . Like the best forms of healing fiction, I felt swept away’ SAMUEL BURR author of The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers
But Ah Hock is aging, and the broth’s quality is fading. His only son, Wei Ming, has no interest in the family business, having spent eight years in Hong Kong trying to prove himself as a chef. Now, he’s struggling with gambling debts, embroiled in a love triangle, and the restaurant he’s been left to run has lost its Global Restaurants Guild star. Invited home to Malaysia for his father’s sixtieth birthday, Wei Ming sees a chance to escape his troubles. But when old conflicts resurface and a local businessman threatens to destroy the family legacy, father and son are forced to ask themselves what truly matters.
Jacket illustration © Betty Qui A Harvill book penguin.co.uk/vintage
I S B N 978-1-787-30529-8
9
9781787305090_Early Mornings at the Laksa Cafe_JKT.indd 1-7
781787 305298
90000
£16.99
26/09/2025 14:02