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Finalist for the 2021 Epigram Books Fiction Prize

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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.
“Yam’s prose is fresh and contemplative—one that I'm excited to read again in the future.” –Lee Jing-Jing, author of How We Disappeared

“A sensitive, assured piece of work with a strong sense of feeling at its centre.” –Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti

“A beautiful and hallucinatory mediation on life, love (or what passes for it) and the elusive nature of reality. The intertwined lives of four friends intersect with historical events and inexplicable, fantastical incidents in a genre-bending novel reminiscent of Haruki Murakami.” –Victor Fernando R. Ocampo, author of The Infinite Library and Other Stories

“In this novel lies the journey across museums and galleries in Kyoto, New York, Madrid and Singapore that you have been dying to crash. If you love meandering paths and performance art, this massive existential road trip will leave you drenched in heartbreak. Enter and lose yourself.” –Heman Chong, artist
Daryl Qilin Yam is the author of Kappa Quartet, a novel published by Epigram Books in 2016. He is also a co-editor of the SingPoWriMo anthology series, a director at Sing Lit Station, and a stageplay producer at non-profit collective Take Off Productions. He holds a BA (Hons) in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Warwick; he won the Second Year Prize from the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, and spent an intercalated year studying under the AIKOM program at the University of Tokyo. His prose and poetry have been published in a number of anthologies and literary journals, which include Esquire (Singapore), LONTAR: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction, OF ZOOS, QLRS, and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal.

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