"Remarkable . . . With brilliant descriptive power and human warmth, Sharlene Teo summons the darker currents of modernity" 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.
PRAISE FOR PONTI
"Sharlene Teo has produced not just a singular debut, but a milestone in South East Asian literature" Tash Aw, author of Five Star Billionaire
"A radiant, achingly beautiful novel about relationships between women" Megan Hunter, author of The End We Start From
"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
"Darkly hilarious. It offers up all the anxiety, snark, sadness, and wonder of being a teenager" Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of Harmless Like You