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Malcom Seah may be just 24, but his literary voice already bears the weight of generations. With Swimming Lessons, his debut novel is out via Penguin Random House SEA—Seah enters the Southeast Asian literary landscape with a story that is both intimate and expansive.
Part supernatural mystery, part coming-of-age drama, the novel blends elements of grief, identity, myth, and metaphysics into a singular, unforgettable experience.
And it’s not the book he expected to debut with. A student of Economics at Singapore Management University, Seah is quick to clarify that writing, not studying, takes up most of his heartspace. “I’d say I’m more of a full-time author and a part-time student,” he quips. Inspiration, he says, comes not on schedule but in spontaneous bursts—on the bus, in the middle of the night, during stolen moments between classes.
It took more than three years for Swimming Lessons to find its final form, morphing through multiple drafts and multiple titles. But through it all, the emotional core remained: the story of Michelle Tan, a young girl grieving her comatose sister, haunted—perhaps literally—by memory, mythology, and the spectres of her past.
At the heart of the novel is Michelle’s deeply personal voice. Told in first person, her narrative is fragmented, raw, and strikingly authentic. “Her words became indistinguishable from mine,” Seah admits. “The novel started to feel strangely personal, People often manage anguish in different ways. Mine was through my words.” Michelle became a conduit for Seah’s own experience with loss.
The novel doesn’t just linger in the emotional, it actively seeks the extraordinary. With a supernatural lion of mythological origin, recurring ghostly phone calls, and a mysterious Department of Supernatural Oddities headed by the quietly tormented Captain Ishaan, Swimming Lessons is steeped in the magical and metaphysical.
Seah draws heavily from Southeast Asian folklore and the supernatural traditions he grew up with in Singapore. He doesn’t like stories that stay in one place or time. Instead, he embraces a kind of narrative juggling that reflects his own disjointed, expansive way of thinking—interweaving grief with ghosts, coming-of-age with chaos theory. But the fantastical never overshadows the emotional truth. “There are just some things you can only explain or feel through the supernatural,” Seah explains. His approach is never for genre’s sake. “Swimming Lessons is not a genre-bound title. It’s a meditation on humanity and the interpersonal relationships that hold so much gravity in our hearts.”
The novel’s tagline—Reality is a luxury. The Truth is never linear.—encapsulates this ethos. Seah sees truth as inherently fragmented, as something that can’t be told in straight lines or neat boxes. His narrative structure reflects this belief, moving between timelines and characters, Michelle, young constable Michael Chakrabarti, and Captain Ishaan—each experiencing the surreal in deeply personal ways. Michael’s late-night encounters with the unknown are laced with suspense, while Ishaan’s scientific rationality is slowly unravelled by unresolved trauma. Fear—whether of the unknown, the past, or of oneself—courses through each arc.
Despite its layered themes and unconventional form, the book resists being classified. “I wouldn’t like to be restricted to a certain genre,” Seah says. His influences reflect that multiplicity—he cites the piercing minimalism of Cormac McCarthy, the moral intricacies of Dostoevsky, the tenderness of Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, and the melancholic clarity of Kazuo Ishiguro. He’s also a lover of crime fiction and supernatural films—genres that inform but don’t define his work.
When asked about queer representation in the book, Seah is firm in his stance: it should be normalised, not spotlighted or tokenised. His characters exist as full people—messy, confused, haunted—not as archetypes. This authenticity has already earned him recognition; he was longlisted for the 2023 Epigram Books Fiction Prize, a rare feat for a debut author. And while Michelle’s story ends here—Seah confirms there will be no sequel—he’s already thinking ahead. His next project, The Lizard Man, is a Singaporean-Scandinavian crime novel that fuses delicate emotional storytelling with a noir edge. It’s actually the manuscript he had hoped would debut first. But perhaps Swimming Lessons, born of personal tragedy and catharsis, was always meant to lead the way.
Seah doesn’t write to fit a shelf. “The genre of the manuscript is irrelevant,” he says. “It’s just a medium for me to write. And I’ll never stop dreaming of new stories.”
Lastly, Swimming Lessons is not merely a novel, it’s an elegy for things lost and things never fully held. With an aching tenderness, Seah guides us through Michelle Tan’s fragmented coming-of-age, where memory is both anchor and undertow. As grief curls like mist over the Singaporean cityscape, and a shadowed lion prowls just out of sight, Seah carves a space where mythology and modernity, queerness and family, the mundane and the magical, flow together like tides under a lunar pull.
The prose drips with an otherworldly cadence, moving fluidly between dreamscape and reality, innocence and reckoning. Through Michelle, Michael, and Ishaan, Seah probes the deepest crevices of human emotion: the silence between sisters, the chill of being watched, the terror of not being believed. And yet, there is also warmth, softness, a quiet kind of hope.
In Swimming Lessons, the supernatural is never just for spectacle, it is metaphor, memory, and meaning, all swirled into one. Seah does not give us clean answers. Instead, he leaves us with feeling—intense, unrelenting, necessary. This is a book to read slowly, like wading into cold water, until it holds you completely. A briliantlly raw debut, and one that promises a literary voice well worth following.