The Winner of Singapore Book Awards 2020

Kitab Kawin (The Book of Mating) offers a more versatile interpretation on women in relationships. It depicts a cruel and tender world not only where desire, longing, and modern perversity go side by side, but also where the realities of women’s lives often include the violence visited upon their bodies.

In the twelve stories that make up this collection, we meet women as diverse in experience as they are in age and occupation: former child brides living together in a Korean restaurant-cum-presumed brothel; a pair of middle-aged artists bickering at the funeral of their famous former lover; and a ghost telling the story of her own grisly murder.

The women in these stories are brave and fulnerable, malleable and intractable, raw and calculated, healthy and hurt. They yearn, trust, desire and love. They fear, waver, doubt, and hate. They fight, defy, fail and triumph. Though the stories’ contemplation is bound up in sex, power, pleasure, pain, guilt, and often debilitating sense of duty, the true events of Kitab Kawin are the unending quest for selfknowledge: what holds the solitary self together and what blows it apart, what makes a woman and what undoes her, how to make peace with one’s past and present selves.