Longlisted for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award
Finalist for the 2021 Epigram Books Fiction Prize
In this time-hopping and genre-defying novel, the passing of the Great Comet of 1996 sets in motion a series of inexplicable events in Kyoto, changing the lives of four friends forever.
"Casts a beguiling spell." –Rachel Heng, author of The Great Reclamation
About
Four friends meet in Kyoto in 1996 under the passage of Comet Hyakutake through the sky: a journalist arrives with her gallerist friend to fulfill her dying mother's last wish, while a runaway discovers a crying woman in front of a train station. For Jing, Mateo, Isaac, and Tori, their weekend of friendship is accompanied by other spectacular signs: fireworks over the Kamo River, phantoms at an underground rave, a talking macaque, and multiple disappearances. Over the course of decades and the span of countries including Singapore, Spain, and Malaysia, the consequences of their meeting unfold into meandering and intersecting paths as they fall in love, grow old, grieve, and dream.
At the heart of Daryl Qilin Yam's ambitious, time-hopping, genre-defying novel is an assured and sensitive study of loss and the endurance of love and companionship. When the beauty of art is not enough to make up for suffering, what do we have left?
Author
Daryl Qilin Yam (b. 1991) is a writer, editor and arts organiser from Singapore. He is the author of the novella Shantih Shantih Shantih (2021), shortlisted for the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize, and the novel Lovelier, Lonelier (2021), which was longlisted for the 2023 International Dublin Literary Award.
He co-founded the literary charity Sing Lit Station. His writing has appeared in periodicals and publications such as the Berlin Quarterly, Mekong Review, Sewanee Review, The Straits Times and The Epigram Books Collection of Best New Singapore Short Stories anthology series. His first novel, Kappa Quartet (2016), was selected by The Business Times as one of the best novels of the year, and described by QLRS as “[breaking] new ground in Singaporean writing… a shimmering and poignant novel, an immensely sympathetic and humane exploration of our existential condition.”
Praise
"A tender, precise book filled with strangeness and beauty, Lovelier, Lonelier casts a beguiling spell. The novel asks the big questions: what does it mean to love? How much of our lives are written in the stars? How can one be free? These are questions that can only be answered in its ambitious scope. Yam builds entire worlds spanning decades and continents that echo, overlap, intersect, linked by a delicate thread of serendipity, and it is a pleasure to inhabit them."
–Rachel Heng, author of The Great Reclamation
"Melancholic, peripatetic, flexuous."
–Amanda Lee Koe, author of Delayed Rays of a Star
“Yam’s prose is fresh and contemplative—one that I'm excited to read again in the future.”
–Lee Jing-Jing, author of How We Disappeared
“A sensitive, assured piece of work with a strong sense of feeling at its centre.”
–Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti
“A beautiful and hallucinatory mediation on life, love (or what passes for it) and the elusive nature of reality. The intertwined lives of four friends intersect with historical events and inexplicable, fantastical incidents in a genre-bending novel reminiscent of Haruki Murakami.”
–Victor Fernando R. Ocampo, author of The Infinite Library and Other Stories
“In this novel lies the journey across museums and galleries in Kyoto, New York, Madrid and Singapore that you have been dying to crash. If you love meandering paths and performance art, this massive existential road trip will leave you drenched in heartbreak. Enter and lose yourself.”
–Heman Chong, artist