Ponti
About this book
An award-winning novel about the value of friendships in present-day Singaporeāa " stirring debutā¦relatable yet unsettling [that] smartly captures earnest teenage myopathy through a tumultuous high school relationship" ( Publishers Weekly, starred review). "I am Miss Frankenstein, I am the bottom of the bell curve." So declares Szu, a teenager living in a dark, dank house on a Singapore cul-de-sac, at the beginning of this richly atmospheric and endlessly surprising tale of non-belonging and isolation.Friendless and fatherless, Szu lives in the shadow of her mother Amisa, once a beautiful actressāwho gained fame for her portrayal of a ghostāand now a hack medium performing sĆ©ances with her sister in a rusty house. When Szu meets the privileged, acid-tongued Circe, an unlikely encounter develops into a fraught friendship that will haunt them both for decades to come.With remarkable emotional acuity, dark comedy, and in vivid prose, Sharlene Teo's Ponti traces the suffocating tangle the lives of four misfits, women who need each other as much as they need to find their own way. It is "at once a subtle critique of the pressures of living in a modern Asian metropolis; a record of the swiftness and ruthlessness with which Southeast Asia has changed over the last three decades; a portrait of the old juxtaposed with the new (and an accompanying dialogue between nostalgia and cynicism); an exploration of the relationship between women against the backdrop of social change; and, occasionally, a love storyāall wrapped up in the guise of a teenage coming-of-age novelā¦Teo is brilliant" ( The Guardian ).
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Chapter 1: Szu
- Chapter 2: Szu
- Chapter 3: Amisa
- Chapter 4: Szu
- Chapter 5: Circe
- Chapter 6: Amisa
- Chapter 7: Circe
- Chapter 8: Szu
- Chapter 9: Amisa
- Chapter 10: Szu
- Chapter 11: Amisa
- Chapter 12: Szu
- Chapter 13: Amisa
- Chapter 14: Circe
- Chapter 15: Szu
- Chapter 16: Circe
- Chapter 17: Szu
- Chapter 18: Amisa
- Chapter 19: Szu
- Chapter 20: Amisa
- Chapter 21: Szu
- Chapter 22: Amisa
- Chapter 23: Circe
- Chapter 24: Szu
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Copyright
