Marc de Faoite

I'm delighted that my story   Seed   is featured in the inaugural issue of Rambutan . A friend of mine gave me the idea over coffee when he related some of the things his elderly neighbour had told him about growing up in Langkawi (where I live) in the early 20th century, when the island was much more isolated than it is today.  I tried to imagine the circumstances that would lead to a father having to make this kind of choice for his daughter.  Apparently incidences like this were common practice at the time. Nowadays the gene pool is much bigger and the villages are no longer isolated, y ou can drive thirty  minutes along a highway to complete a journey that would have taken two days trek through jungle a hundred years ago, t hough arranged marriages, while not that common, still exist, and problems arising from consanguinity are not unknown. I have spoken to people who still remember turtles nesting on the island's beaches, including popular Pantai...

I'm flattered to have one of the stories from Tropical Madness featured in India's prestigious Northeast Review .

Read my short story Protection in Roadside Fiction - April 2014 edition

This story first appeared in Fish Eats Lion , an anthology of Singapore-based speculative fiction published in November 2012 by Math Paper Press  and available for purchase here .  "Marc de Faoite contributes "Last Time Kopitiam," in which a young man unwittingly becomes a tool for urban renovation." - PublishersWeekly As he stood alone in the near silence of the wood-panelled, carpeted elevator only the numbers on the digital display above the door and the popping of his eardrums gave James Sullivan any indication that he was moving upwards through the innards of the building. He was both curious and apprehensive. Juniors like him rarely even got to take the elevator to the CEO's floor, never mind meet the man in person. "Sit down Sullivan. Tea?" "Yes please," said James, as he took a seat on the opposite side of Prescott's huge desk. Prescott had a coveted corner office. The two walls behind him were floor to ceili...

I had already spent more than two months looking for a job and didn't seem any closer to finding one. None of the small ads in the newspaper or the offers at the job centre fitted my peculiar professional profile. If I had been a plasterer or a bricklayer I could have found some work, but I wasn't so I didn't. "Your main advantage is your languages," said the counsellor at the job centre with a smile as she fluttered her eyelashes at me.  "I mean not many people in this part of France are so talented to speak English and French and Dutch. The thing you have to understand though is that there's a reason for that. There's absolutely no need for languages here. Maybe Spanish a bit, but not really. Some people speak Basque, but that won't help you find a job. You really should think about expanding the geographical scope of your search. I think you'd have much more luck on the coast." The French Basque coast stretches from the Span...