Awards

• Long-listed for Big Book Awards: Women Writers Award 2018 (UK)
• Long-listed for Jhalak Prize 2019 (UK)
• Short-listed for Big Book Awards: Women Writers Award 2018 (UK)
• Short-listed for Edward Stanford Fiction, with a Sense of Place Award 2019 (UK)

Overview

Remarkable' - Ian McEwan. 2003, Singapore. Friendless and fatherless, sixteen-year-old Szu lives in the shadow of her mother Amisa, once a beautiful actress and now a hack medium performing séances with her sister in a rusty house. When Szu meets the privileged, acid-tongued Circe, an unlikely encounter develops into an intense friendship and offers Szu a means of escape from her mother's alarming solitariness. Seventeen years later, Circe is struggling through a divorce in fraught and ever-changing Singapore when a project comes up at work: a remake of the cult seventies horror film series 'Ponti', the very project that defined Amisa's short-lived film career. Suddenly Circe is knocked off balance: by memories of the two women she once knew, by guilt, and by a past that threatens her conscience. Told from the perspectives of all three women, Ponti is about friendship and memory, about the things we do when we're on the cusp of adulthood that haunt us years later. Beautifully written by debut author Sharlene Teo, and enormously atmospheric, Ponti marks the launch of an exciting new literary voice in the vein of Zadie Smith.

Full Product Details

9781509855315

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Reviews

A sticky, atmospheric tale of resentment and loneliness * Tatler * The loneliness of adolescence is a monstrosity manifesting in equally ugly and poetic ways. Ponti is a weird and beautiful bildungsroman and Teo's writing shines as totally radical * The Skinny * An unforgettable story of female friendship * Elle Magazine * Strange and compelling . . . a breath of fictional fresh air -- Shena Mackay, Kate Summerscale, and Owen Sheers, judges of the Deborah Rogers Writers Award Spanning 17 years and told from the perspectives of all three women, Ponti is a stunning first novel with a wry, rebellious heart * AnOther * Witty, moving and richly evocative, Ponti paints a portrait of a country and a people negotiating the throes of modernity. It also announces a major talent - Sharlene Teo has produced not just a singular debut, but a milestone in South East Asian literature -- Tash Aw, author of <i>Five Star Billionaire</i> Ponti is darkly hilarious. It offers up all the anxiety, snark, sadness, and wonder of being a teenager. Teo guides us through the grunge of growing up. She asks what it means to be a monster and what it means to be beautiful. Is it possible to be both? -- Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of <i>Harmless Like You</i> This haunting debut hopscotches between decades and cultures, eschewing the usual moves of the coming-of-age story for something truer to the desperate, surreal stakes of adolescence. Sharlene Teo is a daring and genuinely original novelist -- Garth Greenwell, author of <i>What Belongs to You</i> A radiant, achingly beautiful novel about relationships between women -- Megan Hunter, author of <i>The End We Start From</i> Remarkable . . . With brilliant descriptive power and human warmth, Sharlene Teo summons the darker currents of modernity - environmental degradation, the suffocating allure of the sparkling modern city and its cataracts of commodities and corrupted language. Against this, her characters glow with life and humour and minutely observed desperation -- Ian McEwan

Remarkable . . . With brilliant descriptive power and human warmth, Sharlene Teo summons the darker currents of modernity - environmental degradation, the suffocating allure of the sparkling modern city and its cataracts of commodities and corrupted language. Against this, her characters glow with life and humour and minutely observed desperation -- Ian McEwan This haunting debut hopscotches between decades and cultures, eschewing the usual moves of the coming-of-age story for something truer to the desperate, surreal stakes of adolescence. Sharlene Teo is a daring and genuinely original novelist -- Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You

Remarkable . . . With brilliant descriptive power and human warmth, Sharlene Teo summons the darker currents of modernity - environmental degradation, the suffocating allure of the sparkling modern city and its cataracts of commodities and corrupted language. Against this, her characters glow with life and humour and minutely observed desperation -- Ian McEwan

Author Information

Sharlene Teo was born in Singapore in 1987. She has an LLB in Law from the University of Warwick and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, where she received the Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship and the David TK Wong Creative Writing award. She was shortlisted for the Berlin Writing Prize and holds fellowships from the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation and the University of Iowa International Writing Program. In 2016, she won the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writer's Award for Ponti, her first novel.

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