Sharlene Teo

Ponti Sharlene Teo

An award-winning fiction debut about the value of friendships in present-day Singapore-a surprising and powerful portrait of Asia that shows the unique blend of modern and traditional cultures coming together-for fans of Elena Ferrante and Emma Cline

I am Miss Frankenstein, I am the bottom of the bell curve. So declares Szu, a teenager living in a dark, dank house on a Singapore cul-de-sac, at the beginning of this richly atmospheric and endlessly surprising tale of non-belonging and isolation.

Friendless and fatherless, Szu lives in the shadow of her mother Amisa, once a beautiful actress-who gained fame for her portrayal of a ghost-and now a hack medium performing seances with her sister in a rusty house. When Szu meets the privileged, acid-tongued Circe, an unlikely encounter develops into a fraught friendship that will haunt them both for decades to come.

With remarkable emotional acuity, dark comedy, and in vivid prose, Sharlene Teo's Ponti traces the suffocating, tangled lives of four misfits in present-day Singapore, women who need each other as much as they need to find their own way. It is an astounding portrayal of the gaping loneliness of adolescence, the surreality of the modern city, and the strangeness of living with, and loving, other people.