Heaven Has Eyes

HEAVEN HAS EYES: STORIES
by Philip Holden
ISBN: 978-1-958652-22-0
eISBN: 978-1-958652-23-7
$19 / Paperback / 5.5” x 8.5” / 288
Gaudy Boy, January 2026
N. America: Asterism / Bookshop.org / Amazon
Distributed by Asterism & Ingram

“Quietly disquieting, these stories shimmer with unsettling currents … Philip Holden's prose, meditative and thoughtful, has a sharp bite to it.”
—Jeremy Tiang, author of State of Emergency, winner of the Singapore Literature Prize

Set in Singapore, Vancouver, London, and the spaces in between, the short stories in Heaven Has Eyes offer an imaginative, penetrating look at the complexities of migration, belonging, and a desire to find a home in the world.

About

This updated edition, containing four new stories, is also charged with speculative daring, grappling with the entangled strands of forgotten or suppressed political histories. Pierre Trudeau and Lee Kuan Yew, later to become the prime ministers of Canada and Singapore respectively, converse as young men over beer in a smoky pub. An ageing politician yearns to reconcile the tough policy choices he made with the socialist ideals he championed in his youth. A young therapist in London tries to help a traumatized political exile from Singapore. Couples in transnational marriages struggle to make sense of where they belong—or where they want to belong—while venturing out to raucous political rallies, into abandoned mines, and on fraught plane journeys.

In tender, luminous writing, Philip Holden explores piercing psychological questions about what it is like to be haunted by one's past. Deeply moving and emotionally rich, the stories weave together love, loss, grief, miscommunication, forgetting, and remembering— pushing the boundaries of realism, making and unmaking our sense of home.

Author

Philip Holden’s life has spanned three continents, with its centre of gravity in Singapore, where he taught and researched Singapore and Southeast Asian writing at university in a three-decade-long career. He is the author of critical, historical, biographical, and fictional writing, exploring the connections between social and historical narratives and questions of identity, belonging, and agency. Before his academic career he worked in children’s theatre, as a union organizer, and as a residential social worker with refugees. Now a registered clinical counsellor, he explores the intersections of storytelling and mental health through work in Guided Autobiography and in facilitating lived-experience stories. Philip leads a migratory life between Singapore and Vancouver, Canada, and shares the ever-changing story of his life at www.pulauujong.org.

Praise

“Quietly disquieting, these stories shimmer with unsettling currents that stir beneath the placid surface of Singaporean lives past and present. Philip Holden's prose, meditative and thoughtful, has a sharp bite to it.”
—Jeremy Tiang, author of State of Emergency, winner of the Singapore Literature Prize

“The political becomes deeply personal and vice versa in Heaven Has Eyes. Who watches and who interrogates what has been too easily assumed or forgotten? Like a vibration running through the house in one of the stories, Holden’s passionate, speculative voice  posits what possibilities might exist as his characters contemplate the past and face their futures. Where there is “so much light that you cannot see anything”, he creates narrative depth through nuances of introspective shadow. If history and loss lead to “sim tia” for some, Holden asks if memory—and the act of remembering—could serve to transform and even, possibly, liberate us.”
—Lydia Kwa, author of A Dream Wants Waking

“Stories as complex, narrators as multi-lingual, and stylistics as code-switching as the island nation of Singapore from where they come, Philip Holden's stunning collection is a wholly local-global achievement.”
—Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Commonwealth Poetry Prize and American Book Awards winner, and author of Among the White Moon Faces

“This collection of stories is refreshingly honest and daring in its treatment of Singapore's history and quotidian life. The stories disturb; they are painfully truthful. This kind of storytelling is what is missing in Singaporean literature.”
—Lily Rose R. Tope, Professor of English, University of the Philippines