Fiction Frenzy brings forth an excellent curation of books that span across genres like romance, fantasy, crime, mystery, and contemporary fiction. Browse the collection below!
Death and the Maiden
Who wouldn’t cry when they realize that they are dead?
The capital beyond twilight is full of nocturnal birds squealing annoyingly on electricity poles. Who would have known that they were messengers of death who perform music to send souls to the underworld?
Stella is a ghost boy in a skirt who lives in an abandoned tower in the middle of the capital. He calls himself the Eleventh Floor Theater Administrator. Every evening he wakes up to repeat the same routine, caring for lost children, watching a spectacular parade of the Defeated Gamblers. The boy wonders why the Reaper whom he lived with had not yet sent his soul away.
What secrets are the Reaper keeping from him? And what is he being protected from?
Deplorable Conversations with Cats and Other Distractions
Lucky Lee has everything—wealth, charm, money, good looks—and does very, very little with it. He’s content. He’s happy. He takes for granted that life is good and always will be. But then his sister, the go-getting, successful, famous TV chef Pearl Lee, dies, horribly, and suddenly. Lucky is devastated. As he struggles to live without the big sister who’s always been the dominant, often relentless force in his life, the inconceivable happens—her cat begins to talk to him. It wants to know where Pearl is. It questions his eating habits, his outfit choices, his life. It hogs the TV. It tells him stories. Now grief-stricken Lucky has a major problem: he may very well be mad.
Harmony Heights
Harmony Heights is anything but harmonious. In this nineties-style block of condominium located in a forgotten part of town resides a microcosm of bourgeois Malaysian society. From retired judges and doctors to CEOs and homemakers with side hustles, the residents in this apartment pride themselves on being model citizens.
But beneath the veneer of civility and respectability, lies a hotbed of secrets and skeletons that reveal the true nature of these residents. How will they respond to the trials and tribulations which life throws at them? Will they all manage to keep up appearances when their private affairs and exploits are exposed?
Harmony Heights is a peephole, allowing you to look in, to watch the unfolding lives of cheating husbands, ambitious women, unconventional families, and witness explosive (literally) situations. If you look close enough, you might just see someone you know. Are you ready to keep a secret?
Love on the Second Read
Emma Morales, tenacious romance book editor and proud cat lady, knows romance, but love? Nope. Thank you very much.
Enter nerdy science fiction and fantasy editor Kip Alegre, who quotes JRR Tolkien for breakfast and knows heartbreak all too well.
When Emma gets a career-changing sci-fi romance manuscript which may just save their publishing house from folding, she knows she must work with Kip if she wants to succeed.
Sounds simple enough, right? But when the well-meaning meddling best friends, an obsessive ex-boyfriend, and a beautiful ex-fiancée get into the picture, the job doesn’t seem so simple anymore. What starts out as a friendly-flirty-literary smackdown between Emma and Kip by quoting authors from Emily Henry to Brandon Sanderson grows into something deeper than either of them had signed up for.
The deal was to edit the book, not their lives.
Emma and Kip may be willing to read the manuscript over and over again, but will they be willing to give love a second read?
The Showgirl and the Minister
Sydney, 1966. Flower power is in full swing. The Cold War is at its height.
Somewhere in Kings Cross, Singapore’s former Chief Minister Lim Yew Hock is missing. Now the Malaysian High Commissioner to Australia, he had left his home in Canberra without a word of where he had gone.
Is he dead? During his reign as Chief Minister, he had cracked down hard on the Communists, and they will want to settle scores with him.
Is he in hiding from mounting debts? Lim is known for his punts on the horses on weekends.
Or is he mixed up in Cold War espionage? One of his ministers, Chew Swee Kee, was alleged to have received money from the CIA – and there’re rumours Lim had his share of it.
And how is a 19-year-old stripper, Sandra Nelson, Russian by birth, involved in this shady business? Is she Lim’s honey trap?
Private detective Dave Chen has to unravel these tangled knots of political intrigue and personal trauma – and confront his own demons.
Written in poetic form by Felix Cheong and wonderfully illustrated by Arif Rafhan, The Showgirl and the Minister is inspired by the real-life disappearance of Lim over ten days in 1966.
No Room in Neverland
All Gemma Young remembers of her childhood are her regular visits to the idyllic, imaginary Neverland before her mother fell sick.
When Gemma meets Cole, a disenchanted boy who stirs up more than just memories of her adventures in Neverland, she begins to piece together her half-forgotten childhood: her mother sick with longing for Neverland, the accident that ripped her family apart, and her father who abandoned her when she was a child.
But now, Gemma’s near-obsessive quest to find her father sends her spiralling deeper into Neverland just like her mother had. As the boundaries blur between the real world and Neverland, Gemma must sift through fact and fiction, discern between truth and make-belief, to find out what happened to her mother and rebuild a new life with her father.
Sudden Superstar
What happens when one goes from obscurity to celebrity, overnight?
Thirty-year-old Arya Alvarez is a travel manager at Isle Z, a luxury travel company in Singapore where she creates bespoke trips for celebrities and influencers. Discretion is her specialty at work and personal life: few people know that she’s fled her home city, Manila, to get away from the scene of a devastating break-up.
When she travels to Svaneti, in the Republic of Georgia, Arya briefly encounters the mysterious Dave in a remote village high up the Caucasus mountains. Intrigued, she posts his photos on Instagram-which goes viral the very next day. Turns out, Dave is Davit Nadibaidze, a famous yet reclusive artist who’d retreated from the public five years ago and Arya is the first person to see him since he disappeared.
In less than 24 hours, Arya gains hundreds of thousands of followers. She’s deluged with invitations to talk shows, influencer parties, and celebrity junkets, all as her social media apps overflow with DMs, tags, and comments, both nice and nasty. Men are suddenly vying for her attention, including her ex, Jake.
Arya tries her best to step up, but she also struggles. What she really wants is to finally get over her painful break-up, find herself and a fresh start. But can she really, when she’s caught in this complex whirl of viral fame?
Frappes for Three
Maya Joseph is a Penang girl who dreams of becoming a writer despite her father’s objections.
Chong Mei Li is a stylish fashionista who wants to make her mark in the fashion world, although her parents want her to preserve their legacy by taking over the family business in Sabah.
Rohan Das, born and raised in Delhi, needs to work hard and secure a good job to support his middle class family. As the first born son, there’s a lot of pressure for him to excel and little room for him to explore his own interests.
As luck would have it, their paths cross at Maestro University and this unlikely trio soon become good friends. They each have their own dreams and aspirations, but struggle with the burden of family expectations, difficult lecturers and self-doubt. But no matter what happens, they’re always there for each other.
This story of love, loss and self-discovery reminds us that university life, often bittersweet, carves us into the people we are today. And many of the lessons we gain are learned outside the classroom with our dearest friends.
For the Win
Eighteen-year-old Nathaniel Carpio has been having chicken inasal with his best friend Elena Dizon at their favourite sidewalk grillery for four years now, and he likes that things are always the same. But then, on a particularly bad day, Lena whips out a silly six-peso coin to comfort him, and-with the moment holding nothing and everything at the same time-Nat realizes that he’s fallen in love with her.
It only makes sense that when Tala Tales Games-local developer of their favourite real-time strategy game Mitolohiya-offers college scholarships to a select few, the two of them should go for it, right? Nat certainly thinks so-there’s nothing better than spending the rest of his life with Lena doing something they both love.
But just when Nat’s game plan is coming along nicely, in pops a new challenger-Rafael Antonio, the world-renowned Filipino voice actor for the hero Apolaki in Mitolohiya. Now, star-struck Lena spends all her time bonding with her online idol, and Nat starts to feel more and more like a boring Non-Playable Character with zero chance against the Big Final Boss.
With the scholarship program underway and his future hanging in the balance, Nat embarks on an epic quest to compete with the celebrity in a real-world PvP match he’s not ready for. But in the midst of life’s frustrating glitches, epic wipeouts, and disastrous rage-quitting, is winning over his best friend the right strategy after all before it’s Game Over?
Finding Us Again
Bryce and Nora fall in love in their last year of high school. They worry about their relationship surviving after graduation but are separated sooner when Bryce’s father is transferred and Bryce has to leave.
Bryce promises to write but not in a conventional way. He promises to leave messages behind pictures in hotels where his father works. He tells Nora if she finds his messages, they are meant to be together.
Years pass and Bryce leaves messages for Nora as promised, but wonders if it may be more of a habit than anything else.
Bryce and Nora have moved on to other partners over the years and while Bryce still leaves messages for Nora, she has mostly forgotten his promise until she finds an old photo of Bryce. She begins to search for his messages and succeeds in finding one.
This action is enough for fate to trigger a series of serendipitous events that will bring Bryce and Nora together again but at what cost and who will pay the price?
The American Boyfriend
Phoebe Wong would do anything to escape a British winter. But it may cost her more than her airfare.
Sunsets, tacos and margaritas all sound perfect to exhausted forty-three-year-old single mum Phoebe with a dead-end job in Southwark. When her long distance boyfriend in New York invites her to meet him in Florida, she couldn’t wait to jump on a plane with her toddler. Arriving with her teething child at her boyfriend’s Key West ‘vacay home’ before him, she is robbed on her first night. With no money, cards or passports, she is grateful for the support of friendly locals. At a BBQ, she meets an old expat British businessman. Her boyfriend arrives eventually, apologetic, and takes her out to a posh seafood dinner. But when the British expat is shot that night in the same restaurant’s car park, Phoebe is trapped in a put-up job, and her boyfriend’s delayed arrival is suspiciously timed. If this place has turned darker and chillier than London, she wants out.
Will she be able to pull herself and her daughter away from danger?
Mami Suzuki: Private Eye
Beneath the sheen of its orderly streets and obedient populace, all is not well in the port city of Kobe. Business is as brisk as the Haru-ichiban spring breeze for Mami Suzuki, hotel clerk by day, private investigator by night.
Who’s stealing from Japan’s biggest pearl trader? Where’s the master sushi chef and why are his knives missing? How did the tea ceremony teacher’s brother really die? And what does an island of cats have to do with a pregnant Shinto shrine maiden?
From the Kobe wharfs to the rugged Japan Sea coast, the subtropics of Okinawa, and a remote island community in the Seto Inland Sea, each new adventure ends with a universal truth – that there are two sides to every story of misfortune.
There’s a story for every reader, waiting to be discovered.
We invite you to come visit our exclusive Fiction Frenzy display at the Books Kinokuniya Main Store in Singapore until 15th April 2024!
