An intricate blend of mystery and horror with a feminist take on the roles of womanhood, especially motherhood, in contemporary times An unnamed young woman and her companion strike up a conversation in the dark in a quiet room, in the middle of nowhere. As they talk, the young woman starts to open up her life, to talk about her past and childhood, growing up in a single-parent household under poor impoverished conditions, living under the cold, steely eye of an estranged and manipulative mother who physically and emotionally abused her. The woman gradually divulges the lies and secrets that have plagued her life from a very young age, and how all of it has led her to make hard choices along the to be a mistress to her boss at her first job, to have a child out of wedlock, to rear a child all on her own and then to tragically lose him in a drowning. The truth becomes stranger and more complicated as the woman continues to tell her story, braiding and twisting the facts and sequence of events as she narrates, that soon reveals a long unvoiced history of pain and violence and deception, that ultimately culminates in her committing a series of horrific and terrible acts. What has seemed clear and straightforward at the start of the woman’s story soon becomes a strange febrile dream that holds the woman and her companion in a complicit, unbreakable spell.
Author
O Thiam Chin is the winner of the inaugural Epigram Books Fiction Prize in 2015 for his first novel, Now That It's Over, and his second novel, Fox Fire Girl, was shortlisted for the 2016 EBFP; both novels are published by Epigram Books. He is also the author of five collections of short fiction: Free-Falling Man (2006), Never Been Better (2009), Under The Sun (2010), The Rest Of Your Life and Everything That Comes With It (2011) and Love, Or Something Like Love (2013). Love, Or Something Like Love was shortlisted for the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize for English Fiction, and Never Been Better and Under The Sun were included in the top ten fiction books in the POPULAR Readers’ Choice Awards in Malaysia. His short stories have appeared in Mānoa, World Literature Today, The International Literary Quarterly, Asia Literary Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Kyoto Journal, The Jakarta Post, The New Straits Times, Asiatic and Esquire (Singapore). His short fiction was also selected for the first two volumes of The Epigram Books Collection of Best New Singaporean Short Stories anthology series. O was an honorary fellow of the Iowa International Writing Program in 2010, a recipient of the NAC Young Artist Award in 2012, and has been thrice longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He has appeared frequently at writers festivals in Australia, Indonesia and Singapore.
