Central Public Library – Programme Room 1
07:00 PM - 08:30 PM
Free Admission
About the Programme
Join us at Singapore Literature Book Club as we discuss We Are Not Alone Here. As this will be an interactive session, please come prepared to discuss the book and share your thoughts!
About the Author
O Thiam Chin is the author of four novels and seven collections of stories, including A Thing of Fun, published in 2025. His work has appeared in Granta, The Cincinnati Review, Washington Square Review, Mānoa, The Brooklyn Rail and World Literature Today. He was an honorary fellow of the Iowa International Writing Program in 2010, and a recipient of the National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award in 2012.
About the Book
An unnamed young woman and her companion strike up a conversation in the dark in a quiet room, in the middle of nowhere. As they talk, the young woman starts to open up her life, to talk about her past and childhood, growing up in a single-parent household under poor impoverished conditions, living under the cold, steely eye of an estranged and manipulative mother who physically and emotionally abused her. The woman gradually divulges the lies and secrets that have plagued her life from a very young age, and how all of it has led her to make hard choices along the way: to be a mistress to her boss at her first job, to have a child out of wedlock, to rear a child all on her own and then to tragically lose him in a drowning.
The truth becomes stranger and more complicated as the woman continues to tell her story, braiding and twisting the facts and sequence of events as she narrates, that soon reveals a long unvoiced history of pain and violence and deception, that ultimately culminates in her committing a series of horrific and terrible acts. What has seemed clear and straightforward at the start of the woman’s story soon becomes a strange febrile dream that holds the woman and her companion in a complicit, unbreakable spell.
About Singapore Literature Book Club
From NLB’s Singapore collection comes a book club with a unique local flavour. Discuss books by both well-known and emerging Singaporean authors touching on topics close to home. Get acquainted with local literature and discover national literary treasures right here at the libraries.
To find out more about NLB's literary art events, join our mailing list at https://go.gov.sg/la-edm!
About LearnX Communities
The Singapore Literature Book Club is one of NLB’s many LearnX Communities that connect like-minded people to create a modern kampong of communal learning. These communities cover a wide range of topics and can be found in libraries all over the island.
Interested? Head over to https://go.gov.sg/what-is-a-learnx-community to join an existing community or start one of your own!