It wasn't love, really. They were just trying to make something out of their lives. Kyoto, 1996, during the passing of Comet Hyakutake: A runaway from Singapore discovers a woman crying in front of a train station at 5.46am. A Straits Times journalist later arrives with her gallerist friend from Madrid, dreading the reenactment of her mother's performance art. The lives of these four friends—Isaac, Tori, Jing and Mateo—become entangled as a result of one madcap weekend, when fireworks are inexplicably shot over the Kamo River and people become swept to alternate worlds via public transport. Daryl Qilin Yam’s genre-defying second novel ranges across countries and decades, charting the tributaries of pain we thread with our friends and the arcs of the many stories we tell in order to live.

Behind the golden façade of a land filled with opportunities dwell two destitute souls, shipped to Singapore in the late 1800s. Oseki, an ingenue forced into prostitution as a karayuki, grapples with being betrayed by her own father and transforms into a monster she can’t recognise. Gobind, a deaf convict from India, serves his sentence as a punkhawala to a British hunter obsessed with killing Rimau Satan, a man-eating tiger of mythic proportions. Whenever Gobind hunts with his master, his butchered memories lurk in the darkness, aching to pounce. When Oseki’s and Gobind’s paths intertwine, they begin to face their inner demons to find their humanity—and their way back home.

A dozen short stories from the singular mind behind Lovelier, Lonelier and Kappa Quartet. Being your best, most authentic self can be a somewhat grievous process. The winner of a beauty pageant bursts into flames the moment she is crowned. A man enters a dream and re-encounters a former lover in Pyongyang, North Korea. A gaggle of hipsters catches news of a secret Bon Iver concert playing somewhere on Dempsey Hill, only to risk the survival of their friendship. Daryl Qilin Yam’s long-awaited first collection of short fiction combines magical realism, speculative autobiography and ekphrasis to weave illusory figures out of gung-ho millennials and the well-meaning mentor figures who fail them, and unveils the strange quests queer folk must embark on in order to keep a hold on love.