Suicide Club
Rachel Heng
Sceptre: 2018
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Ponti
Sharlene Teo
Picador: 2018
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Among this year’s bumper crop of debuts by Singapore novelists, no two seem more perfectly opposed: Rachel Heng’s fable of the future, Suicide Club, confronts its characters with the terror of longevity, while Sharlene Teo’s Ponti is steeped in the speculative worlds of past and present Singapore, where myths and ghosts outlive their proprietors.

Yet these two books have more in common than meets the eye. Both examine the fault-lines of cruelty in society and the self, and pose urgent questions about the limits of narrative itself: how far do the stories we tell shape our dreams and fates? Though one is set farther afield than the other, they tell us with equal prescience about the horrors we enact and inhabit.

Suicide Club explores what happens when the pursuit of life itself becomes the chief end of individual and common existence. It opens at a birthday party in near-future New York, where Lea, a well-paid and well-liked analyst is celebrating her 100th birthday. This is nothing out of the ordinary: most downtown city-dwellers are “lifers”, the lucky bearers of genes that predispose them to longevity, and hence make them ideal candidates for each new wave of anti-ageing technology, applied to their bodies on a weekly basis by a corps of devoted “tenders”.

• Tags: Issue 13, Rachel Heng, Sharlene Teo, Theophilus Kwek