Product Description
by O. Thiam Chin (Author)
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 way: 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 Biography
O Thiam Chin is the author of three novels and six collections of short fiction. His debut novel, Now That It's Over, won the inaugural Epigram Books Fiction Prize in 2015. His work has appeared in Granta, The Cincinnati Review, Manoa, The Brooklyn Rail, QLRS, World Literature Today and elsewhere.
