When a Flower Dies
What can we recover after a life passes on?
A novel about love, forgetting and remembering. Pansy Lim, a Peranakan girl, was brought up in a seaside village in colonial Singapore in the 1940s.
She inherits her mother’s love for flowers, nature, the sea, and their healing qualities. Educated by English nuns, she learns and grows to love English, literature and poetry.
We see her at the start of the novel, aged, forgetful, and desperately clinging to memories of her recently deceased husband.
Through her recollections, she remembers George Chan, the village life that they shared, and the communal past left behind by a nation always on the move.
When a Flower Dies
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Reviews
“When I pick up one of Josephine Chia’s books on Singapore’s past, I always know that I’m in for a treat. Josephine brings her readers back to the Singapore of the 1950s and 60s that she grew up in and, in her simple, accessible prose she realistically evokes its sights and sounds and smells. In doing so, she helps us to re-live and re-imagine those days and, in singing her song, she helps us to sing ours.” −Angeline Yap, poet and author of “Closing My Eyes to Listen”
“When it comes to historical fiction, Josephine Chia is in a class of her own. Combining beautifully history with memory, strong reality with desired fantasy, she has woven a poetical tapestry that proves engaging, even alluring. I have no doubt that this novel will appeal to readers old and young, Singaporean and non-Singaporean for it is, ultimately, about love. Love in its manifold splendour.” − Dr Kirpal Singh, author of Thinking Hats & Coloured Turbans and Director, Wee Kim Wee Centre, Singapore Management University
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Attunement
Is life hustling you out of tune? As the week roars by, we invite you to a slice of attunement penned lovingly by our authors, friends, and yours truly. Freshly delivered weekly with care. Intimacy guaranteed. Read selected letters below.
Magical, luminous things
Feb 19, 2022
I have flown across an ocean this week. This still sounds surreal to say.
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No negotiation for blood debt
Feb 14, 2022
The Burmese language resistance poetry is deeply embedded in the country’s colonial past. When mo...
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Burning holes in the darkness
Feb 7, 2022
Poets killed in broad daylight, writers tortured and maimed. I wonder if their ghosts watch on fr...
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