Rindu

Singapore, 1838. Tan Ling Ling is fifteen years old, Hainanese, and works in a British merchant's household near Commercial Square. She has taught herself English from other people's newspapers. She has never had lessons. When her employer's daughter finds a notice in an old copy of The Times - a young London clerk seeking correspondence from any person of intelligence in the Eastern Settlements - Ling waits two weeks.
Then she writes back. What follows is a correspondence of five years, crossing the Indian Ocean in both directions, taking three months each way. Edward Gale is a junior clerk in the Eastern trade who writes the word nutmeg into ledgers without knowing what nutmeg smells like. Ling knows exactly what it smells like. She has breathed it her whole life without knowing there was a man in London writing down its weight.
Rindu is an epistolary novel told in letters and the silences between them - what is written and sent, and what is lived while waiting for a reply. It is a love story about distance, about honesty, about the full cost of knowing someone you cannot reach. And about a Malay word with no English translation: the ache of missing someone, which turns out to be a very specific kind of ache. Some things are entirely real and still do not become a life.