Showing results by narrator "Vera Chok" in All Categories

One autumn morning, Jia Jia walks into the bathroom of her lavish Beijing apartment to find her husband dead. One minute she was breakfasting with him and packing for an upcoming trip, the next, she finds him motionless in their half-full bathtub. Like something out of a dream, next to the tub Jia Jia discovers a pencil sketch of a strange watery figure, an image that swims into Jia Jia's mind and won't leave.

One morning in autumn, just after breakfast, Jia Jia finds her husband dead in the bathtub of their Beijing apartment. Next to him is a piece of folded paper, a sketch of a strange creature from his dream. He has left her no other sign. Young, alone and with many unanswered questions, Jia Jia sets out on a journey. Starting at her neighbourhood bar, fuelled by anger, bewilderment, curiosity and love, she travels from nocturnal Beijing to the high plains of Tibet, deep into her past in order to arrive at her future. 

“I am Miss Frankenstein, I am the bottom of the bell curve.” So declares Szu, a teenager living in a dark, dank house on a Singapore cul-de-sac, in this richly atmospheric and surprising tale of non-belonging and isolation. Friendless and fatherless, Szu lives in the shadow of her mother Amisa, once a beautiful actress - who gained fame for her portrayal of a ghost - and now a hack medium performing séances with her sister in a rusty house. When Szu meets the privileged, acid-tongued Circe, an unlikely encounter develops into a fraught friendship that will haunt them both for decades.

How does it feel to be constantly regarded as a potential threat, strip-searched at every airport? Or be told that as an actress, the part you're most fitted to play is 'wife of a terrorist'? How does it feel to have words from your native language misused, misappropriated and used aggressively towards you? How does it feel to hear a child of colour say in a classroom that stories can only be about white people? How does it feel to go 'home' to India when your home is really London?

Once upon a time, Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories - fantastical yarns of wondrous creatures in faraway places-bewitched children across the world. But times change. Today, Kipling's writing tells us a different tale; of a love of Empire, and the troubling legacy of British colonialism. In Not So Stories, writers of colour from around the world reclaim these stories and remake them into something new. Something different. 

2003, Singapore. Friendless and fatherless, 16-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, an unlikely encounter develops into an intense friendship and offers Szu a means of escape from her mother's alarming solitariness.

Child of Air, Water, Earth or Fire: now that she is 13, Storm must undertake The Choosing and be claimed by one of the Elementals, which will determine her whole life’s work. But for Storm, daughter of a father murdered by Water and a warrior mother claimed by Earth, there will be no easy destiny. The Elementals bestow her with a great and terrible gift. Storm-bringer. Storm-rider. Storm-queller. Storm has powers that no one, not even the island Elders, can understand. 

As the island’s new Weather witch, Storm must sail with the fleet into dangerous waters. The Drowned Ones are out for revenge, and the sea itself is treacherous. But it’s Bellum Town that brings Storm her first real test. And where she learns that her magic could save her or it could be the end of everything. Another action-packed fantasy adventure as Storm discovers just how powerful she really is.