Excerpt from We, the Survivors by Tash Aw, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Sometimes I'd see strange shapes drifting in the middle of the river. Fallen tree trunks and bushes uprooted by the storms upstream, tangled together in huge rafts that looked like some sort of mythical beast from Journey to the West, the kind of nonsense that adults tell children to scare them into behaving themselves, but that no one actually takes seriously, not even children – what kid actually believes in a nine-headed bug? – until one night they're walking alone on a riverbank, and then those demons seem real and terrifying. Other times, snagged in the reeds right by where I was walking, I'd see a dead creature, a body so bloated that I couldn't even tell what it was – a could-be cat or a could-be monkey. When a body's been in the water for that long, its shape starts to blur, softening around the edges until it becomes impossible to distinguish one kind of animal from another.

My arm ached, I was moving in a funny way, one side of my body less mobile than the other. I realised that I was still holding the piece of wood, the length of tree branch that had felt so light in my hand just a short while ago but now seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. During the trial, when people in court referred to the murder weapon that was never retrieved, I remembered the damp two-foot piece of wood that I held that night. It was just a fragment of a tree. A few hours earlier, when I'd struck the man for the first time, the broken length of wood had seemed so insignificant that I thought it incapable of causing pain. I expected it to shatter, I expected the man to laugh at my ridiculous choice of weapon. Now it felt as if I was lifting an entire tree, the weight of the world clinging to its roots. I raised my arm, wanting to throw it far out into the middle of the river, but suddenly I found that I had no strength left in my body. It slipped from my grasp and fell just a few feet away.

I realised after a while that the police were not going to arrive. No one was going to come for me. Not that night, not the following day, and maybe not for weeks. In the end it took them more than two months to arrest me – but you already know that. You also know why it took so long. When the victim is that sort of person, the police don't really care. Yes, that kind of person. A foreigner. An illegal. Someone with dark skin.

Bangla, Myanmar, Nepal. When the police come it's all the same to them. Even Africa. It's as if they all come from one big nameless continent. Back when I was living in Puchong, I saw a group of Africans by the side of the road, a dozen men. Some were sitting on the pavement, others were standing up, laughing, joking, drinking beer and liquor. One or two were dancing – they had a big portable set that played their tunes so loudly I almost couldn't hear my own music. I was listening to Jacky Cheung on my phone – back then we only had those small Sony Ericssons that made every song sound crackly, as if you were listening to it on the radio in a faraway country. Maybe you're too young to remember those phones. I was on the other side of the road, outside the 7-Eleven, eating a Ramly burger with Keong. This was seventeen, eighteen, maybe even twenty years ago. Back then you didn't see so many Africans around. People didn't know anything about them – which countries they were from, why they'd come here. Ask anyone what they knew about Africa and they'd say, Lions.

Keong was looking at his phone, pretending he wasn't interested, as if he'd grown up with black people. But he couldn't help making comments. Wahlau, Muhammad Ali brought all his friends! I remember laughing, even though I didn't really find it funny. Most probably I made some comments too. It was so long ago, I don't recall. There was a light breeze that night, I remember that. Next to us an old Indian stallkeeper was clearing up his stand for the night. Business was slow, there weren't many people out on the street. 'Every Friday night,' he said. 'Every week they come here and raise trouble. Friday supposed to be holy day – these guys, they don't respect anything.' In fact he didn't say these guys, he said these Mat Hitam. Better not translate that.

Excerpted from We, the Survivors by Tash Aw. Copyright © 2019 by Tash Aw. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.