His first novel, The Harmony Silk Factory, was nominated for he 2005 Man Booker Prize and won the 005 Whitbread Book Awards First Novel Award, as well as the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel (Asia Pacific region). So the pressure is obviously on for the second offering from Malaysian writer Tash Aw.
But Aw says the pressure has come more from himself than his publisher. 'I think any half-decent writer will put the pressure on themselves to try new things and depart from their first work,' says Aw, 35. Now, after more than two years' labour, that second book is almost complete and set to be released in the fourth quarter of this year.
Set in Malaysia and Indonesia in 1964, Map of the Invisible World tells the story of two poor orphaned Indonesian brothers separated at an early age: one is adopted by a well-to-do family in Kuala Lumpur while the other stays in Indonesia.
'This novel is about how these two brothers find their own ways in life and, more generally, how we locate ourselves in a changing world, how we define the limit of personal freedom,' Aw says.
The author chose the 1960s as a time frame because he wanted to capture two societies in a state of flux. 'In the case of Indonesia you'd had 15 years of independence, in Malaysia seven years and we were still really confused and not sure about what to do. There were so many forces pulling the two countries in different directions and I just wanted this as the backdrop for the two characters' life stories,' he says.
The historical context, however, is merely a background for the brothers' stories. 'Far more important are the personal lives of each of the characters,' he says, adding that both of his novels so far examine 'how we de-tangle ourselves from our past and how we come to terms with it'.
Aw was born in Taipei in 1973 to Malaysian parents, grew up in Kuala Lumpur from the age of two and moved to England as a teenager. He read law at Cambridge and Warwick universities and worked as a corporate lawyer in London before resigning to write full time.