This is a novel with a social conscience. Aw examines many of the issues Malaysia has faced in the past decades, particularly the lives of those who have paid, and continue to pay, the price for the country’s rapid, if staggered, development.

While Malaysia’s other dominant ethnicities are almost entirely absent, the Bangladeshi and Indonesian immigrant communities play a significant role, and we understand that they too merit inclusion in the titular ‘We’, that they count among the survivors. Though here, as in real life, many do not survive, falling prey to disease, or the abuse of human traffickers, among other things, including our murderous protagonist.

Malaysia’s chronic overdependence on cheap, and often illegal, foreign labour, is one of the important themes in this book. Aw points out that the type of manual work that might once have been an option for non-academically inclined Malaysians like Ah Hock is simply no longer available, since wages are undercut by those willing to endure the harshest of conditions for what amount to starvation wages.

“If a Bangladeshi worker went to Singapore,” he writes, “he’d earn fifty times what he’d earn back home” but they “mostly end up here, because in Singapore there are rules, permits, all that nonsense you can’t change. Try to bribe someone, you go straight to jail. No permit, no talk. But here it’s different.”

This difference, and the divergence between Malaysia and Singapore, while not the main theme of the book, is repeatedly revisited, and by doing so Aw highlights the moral vacuum that allows the worst kinds of behavior to flourish unregulated in Malaysia.

Perhaps the part of the novel that works best is the microcosm of the fish farm where Ah Hock finds work as a foreman. Like Malaysia, the farm’s success is largely predicated on a plentiful supply of cheap labour. But when that workforce is no longer available everything starts to collapse and spiral out of control, leading the fish farm to ruin and accelerating Ah Hock down his road towards perdition.

Though occasionally Ah Hock seems a little too articulate, in its details We, the Survivors is accurate and authentic, often unflinchingly so. Aw’s use of language is plain and unadorned, giving the story an unambiguous immediacy, as well as perhaps an accessibility to a potential readership his earlier work might not have had.

All in all, this fine novel makes a very welcome addition to the Southeast Asian canon and Malaysia’s expanding store of internationally recognised literature in English.