Ponti
19 April 2018Synopsis
Shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Fiction with a Sense of Place Award.
Longlisted for the Jhalak Prize.
'Remarkable . . . her characters glow with life and humour' 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, they develop an intense friendship which offers Szu an escape from her mother’s alarming solitariness, and Circe a step closer to the fascinating, unknowable Amisa.
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 by Sharlene Teo is an exquisite story of friendship and memory spanning decades. Infused with mythology and modernity, with the rich sticky heat of Singapore, it is at once an astounding portrayal of the gaping loneliness of teenagehood, and a vivid exploration of how tragedy can make monsters of us.
Shortlisted for Hearsts' Big Book Award 2018.
Details
19 April 2018
9781509883073Reviews
Remarkable . . . With brilliant descriptive power and human warmth, Sharlene Teo summons the darker currents of modernity . . . her characters glow with life and humour and minutely observed desperationIan McEwan
A radiant, achingly beautiful novel about relationships between womenMegan Hunter, author of The End We Start From
A triumph: a nuanced examination of betrayal and grief, memory and the corrupting effects of beautySunday Times
With its thoughtful plot and vibrant prose, Ponti is one of the more assured debuts I’ve read recently . . . Too many first novels coast along on a fad-like buzz rather than the promise of a genuine upward trajectory, but everything about Ponti suggests it’s the rare, real deal and Teo’s a writer we’ll be reading for many years to come.Financial Times
