A comic portrait of work, intimacy and social expectation in Singapore at full speed.

At its centre is Lee Jaylin, a thirty-one-year-old advertising executive whose lover leaves to travel the world just as she finds herself stuck promoting designer condoms—a premise Yu uses to pry open the machinery of ambition, sex, friendship, family and professional life. 

The book moves through a linked cast and a sequence of episodes with titles like “Sociology 101,” “Male Subjugation,” “Behind the News” and “Papaya Farms,” giving it an episodic, almost story-cycle quality even as the characters and pressures accumulate. Yu is especially good on the absurdity produced when private desires collide with the scripts handed down by work, class, family and gender. 

This edition was reissued as part of the Marshall Cavendish Classics literary fiction series, intended to bring significant Singaporean writing back into circulation.

Edition / condition: Marshall Cavendish Editions, Singapore, 2021. Marshall Cavendish Classics edition; first published by Times Editions in 1993. Paperback. Light shelf wear and rubbing to covers, with minor corner wear; internally clean and binding firm. Very good condition.