Billy, Seetoh & Co
Releasing October 2nd, 2026
Book Launch: Auditorium @ The Inspire Space, 7:45-10 02/10/26
Billy, Seetoh and Co: Synopsis
Releasing 2nd October 2026, Billy, Seetoh & Co, Kasan Goh’s semi-autobiographical first novel, is a two-way mirror into mid-80s to late 90s London, seen through the prism of newly arrived Southeast Asian immigrants who must live by their wits in Thatcher’s Britain.
Billy Chan, a Singaporean student, arrives fresh-off-plane in London, only to be shipwrecked when his family go bankrupt, implode, and flee their homeland in disgrace.
He is befriended by fellow castaway Seetoh, a country boy from the Ipoh Hills in Malaysia; together with a ragtag posse of friends they adventure through South London and beyond in search of a home, and a belonging.
The Co, short for Reverse East India Company, is a riff on Newton’s third law of motion and the inevitability that for every East India Company, there will be an equal and opposite Reverse East India Company.
In its youthfulness, pace and multifaceted narrative, Billy, Seetoh & Co has the flavour of Fernando Meirelles’ City of God without the gun violence, but with the chickens.
Literary touchstones are The Story of the Stone— perhaps the most loved of all Chinese classics— Cao Xueqin’s epic, multi-layered, semi-autobiographical Qing Dynasty soap opera of the dreamer Jia Baoyu and his family’s heavy fall from grace, and Journey to the West, Wu Cheng’en’s retelling of the Monkey King folktale.
Of Billy, Seetoh & Co, Australian novelist Helen Garner (How to End a Story, Baillie Gifford Prize 2025) writes,
This is an ambitious, highly literate novel. It sweeps the reader away into unfamiliar worlds, and makes familiar ones strange. A current of almost-laughter flows beneath its constantly modulating narrative voice. Its language is fresh, its imagery a panorama of bright and accurate detail. People love each other, rage at each other, feed and protect and betray and abandon each other, yet somehow find each other again in new configurations. It’s a moving and original piece of work, overflowing with life’s crazy, painful sweetness.
Advance reviews
Ng Yi Sheng
Guat Eng Chuah
Guat Eng Chuah
An extraordinary new work, brimming with raw energy yet polished with the weight of experience—as befits the longform fiction début of an author in his 60s.
Goh brings to life the world and perspectives of 1980s Singapore, "the island shaped like Aladdin's lamp", with a playful, polyglot, jazzy prose that hovers on the brink of magical realism, bringing together nostalgia, history (both personal and political), myth and dreams in a manner hitherto unseen in our nation's literature. Ambitious, transnational, sexy and genre-smashing, this really could be a candidate for the great Singaporean novel.
Guat Eng Chuah
Guat Eng Chuah
Guat Eng Chuah
Goh employs the device of an unreliable narrator who makes free with multiple literary forms:
Bildungsroman, dream sequences, epistolary, Chinese epics, and poetry.
These authorial tactics, which embed questions on national identity, diaspora and the discourses on East-West power shifts, make this an intellectually satisfying novel.
Together with the multiple allusions to the literatures of Singapore's main cultural influences, Billy, Seetoh & Co reflects the nature of the story of Singapore told for Singapore and, of course, the world.
I more than liked the novel, I felt a resonance with it. And found myself thinking that Goh's way
might be the only honest way for post-colonials to tell their stories.
Its publication is significant.
Ann Ang
Guat Eng Chuah
Ann Ang
An unabashed romp full of post-empire camp, and poignant by turns in its longing for home, Kasan Goh's Billy, Seetoh & Co. provides a diasporic counter-perspective to Singapore's national
development story of the seventies and eighties.
Pre-orders available now via Landmark Books
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Kasan Goh
