Ponti

By: Sharlene Teo

Narrated by: Vera Chok

Length: 9 hrs and 36 mins

Publisher's summary

Shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Fiction with a Sense of Place Award.
Longlisted for the Jhalak Prize.

'Remarkable . . . her characters glow with life and humour' 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, they develop an intense friendship which offers Szu an escape from her mother’s alarming solitariness, and Circe a step closer to the fascinating, unknowable Amisa.

Seventeen years later, Circe is struggling through a divorce in fraught and ever-changing 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 short-lived 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 by Sharlene Teo is an exquisite story of friendship and memory spanning decades. Infused with mythology and modernity, with the rich sticky heat of Singapore, it is at once an astounding portrayal of the gaping loneliness of teenagehood, and a vivid exploration of how tragedy can make monsters of us.

Shortlisted for Hearsts' Big Book Award 2018.

©2018 Sharlene Teo (P)2018 Macmillan Digital Audio

Critic reviews

A radiant, achingly beautiful novel about relationships between women (Megan Hunter, author of The End We Start From)

Every now and then, as a writer, you read a debut that feels so fully formed and on its feet, that part of you blanches at the failings of your own debut . . . Ponti is one of the most exciting books I have read in ages . . . There's something so effortless about Teo's prose, which captures Singapore from the late 1960s up to 2020. The book is as funny as it is strange, it is complex as it is light . . . Teo manages to spin the time period with ease and keep the reader utterly engrossed . . . Teo is an exciting author and Ponti is step one of a long illustrious career. It deserves prizes (Nikesh Shukla)

Witty, moving and richly evocative, Ponti paints a portrait of a country and a people negotiating the throes of modernity. It also announces a major talent — Sharlene Teo has produced not just a singular debut, but a milestone in South East Asian literature (Tash Aw, author of Five Star Billionaire)

This haunting debut hopscotches between decades and cultures, eschewing the usual moves of the coming-of-age story for something truer to the desperate, surreal stakes of adolescence. Sharlene Teo is a daring and genuinely original novelist (Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You)

Strange and compelling . . . a breath of fictional fresh air (Shena Mackay, Kate Summerscale, and Owen Sheers, judges of the Deborah Rogers Writers Award)

Ponti is darkly hilarious. It offers up all the anxiety, snark, sadness, and wonder of being a teenager. Teo guides us through the grunge of growing up. She asks what it means to be a monster and what it means to be beautiful. Is it possible to be both? (Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of Harmless Like You)

"Narrator Vera Chok delivers an outstanding performance of this debut novel about family, friendship, and memory in Singapore...Chok's narration is upbeat and conversational. Her charming voice and accent perfectly embody the multicultural aspects of the three women: prim and proper Amisa, awkward Szu, and self-centered Circe. A unique and engrossing listen." (AudioFile Magazine)