“Barrie Sherwood has created some truly memorable characters who act as a reflecting pond to our own hopes and insecurities.”
—Tash Aw, critically acclaimed author of We, The Survivors

Winner for the 2020 Singapore Book Awards (Best Book Cover Design)

Barrie Sherwood

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Synopsis
A couple's cat leaves offerings of dead birds freighted with mysterious import. A foreign worker helps construct a concert hall that reawakens his musical longings. A young diver hunts venomous cone snails for a lovelorn researcher.

With disarming simplicity, Barrie Sherwood charts how the complex bonds between lovers are unravelled to the point of breaking, and the often strange and touching ways we define ourselves and our relationships in a fluctuating world.

Praise
“Droll, whimsical and tender, these stories feature individuals teetering delicately on the edge, waiting to fall into each other or into a startling revelation about themselves.” —Cyril Wong, award-winning author of Ten Things My Father Never Taught Me

“In Barrie Sherwood’s deft hands, the most banal aspects of daily life morph into the weird and wondrous—airports evolve into dystopian landscapes, dead city birds mutate into sacred offerings, high-end supermarkets transform into museums of treasure. Like all the best writers, Sherwood shows us the incontrovertible magic in the mundane. Tender, funny and laced with a dash of the absurd, these stylish stories will seduce, intrigue and most of all, endure.”
—Kirstin Chen, author of Bury What We Cannot Take

“Beneath the placid surface of these stories lies all the pain and joy of human life as people struggle—sometimes quietly, sometimes less so—to make sense of their place in a changing, multicultural world. Barrie Sherwood has created some truly memorable characters who act as a reflecting pond to our own hopes and insecurities.”
—Tash Aw, critically acclaimed author of We, The Survivors

About the Author
Barrie Sherwood is the author of two novels: The Pillow Book of Lady Kasa (2000) and Escape from Amsterdam (2007). A Hong Kong native of Canadian and French nationality, he now lives in Singapore and is the assistant professor in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University. This is his first-short story collection.

ISBN: 9789814785662
Format: Paperback
Size: 198mm x 129mm
Pages: 240pp
Published: September 2019

Erratum
p. 87: “She worked at Bagus w for a time.” should read as “She worked at Bagus Guesthouse for a time.”

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