'Remarkable' - 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 everchanging 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 shortlived 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.