Tan Twan Eng was born in Penang and lived in various places in Malaysia as a child. His first novel, The Gift of Rain, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Greek, Romanian, Czech and Serbian. (source)
"On a mountain above the clouds, in the central highlands of Malaya lived the man who had been the gardener of the Emperor of Japan.” Teoh Yun Ling was seventeen years old when she first heard about him, but a war would come, and a decade would pass before she travels up to the Garden of Evening Mists to see him, in 1951.