About the Book
It is 2003, and in the sweltering heat of Singapore sixteen-year-olds Szu and Circe develop an intense friendship. For Szu it offers an escape from Amisa, her beautiful, cruel mother – once an actress and now the silent occupant of a rusty house. But for Circe, their friendship does the opposite, bringing her one step closer to the fascinating, unknowable Amisa.
Seventeen years later, Circe finds herself adrift and alone. And then a project comes up at work, a remake of the cult seventies horror film series ‘Ponti’, the same series 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 lost friendship that threatens her conscience . . .
Format: Paperback (304 pages) Publisher: Picador
Publication date: 23rd April 2019 Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Find Ponti on Goodreads
Purchase links
Bookshop.org
Disclosure: If you buy a book via the above link, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops
Hive | Amazon UK
Links provided for convenience only, not as part of an affiliate programme
My Review
The book moves between three different timelines: Szu’s account of her teenage friendship with Circe in 2003, Circe’s reflections in the present day, and Amisa’s story beginning in 1968. I have to say I found Amisa’s story the most absorbing, describing as it does how, as a result of a series of disappointments, she becomes the cold, distant mother we encounter through Szu’s eyes. The sadness of Amisa’s story is that the shattering of her dreams is something she never really gets over.
Szu’s and Circe’s teenage friendship emerges from a shared feeling of being outsiders, ‘citizens of nowhere’ in Circe’s words. It’s this sense that they don’t belong that initially draws them together. But, despite being intense, it’s not an untroubled relationship because of their different backgrounds and life experiences. Looking back, Circe marvels at how brief what she terms the ‘Age of Szu’ actually was. She describes the gradual fracturing of their relationship, how being friends with Szu became ‘like carrying around a heavy, sloshing bucket of water’.
I could completely empathise with what Szu goes through but also understand what a vast amount of patience on the part of a friend would be required to see her through the worst times. Circe, who in the modern day story seems to rid herself of partners in the same merciless way she does her tapeworm, I found less easy to like.
All three women are, in different ways and with varying degrees of success, trying to find their way through life. It’s a well-crafted novel and an impressive debut. There was a lot I liked about it without completely falling in love with it.
In three words: Insightful, intimate, assured
Try something similar: Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie
About the Author
Sharlene Teo was born in Singapore in 1987. She has an LLB in Law from the University of Warwick and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, where she received the Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship and the David TK Wong Creative Writing award. She was shortlisted for the Berlin Writing Prize and holds fellowships from the Elizabeth Kostova Flundation and the University of Iowa International Writing Program.
In 2016, she won the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writers’ Award for Ponti, her first novel. (Photo: Goodreads author page)
Connect with Sharlene
Goodreads
What Cathy Read Next... 