Almost a Love Story by Carissa Foo | Sing Lit Book Club

About the Programme

Join us at Singapore Literature book Club for an exclusive discussion of the featured book with the author present. As this will be an interactive session, please come prepared to discuss the book and share your thoughts!

About the Author

Carissa Foo  is a fiction writer, literary scholar, and educator. She received her Ph.D. from Durham University, with a research focus on twentieth-century women’s writing and its dialogues with spatial theory and queer studies. She reads narratives of women’s lived experience and feminine modes of navigation in inhospitable worlds.

Her recent publications include an article on familial tendencies in Singaporean queer politics (Sexuality & Culture) and the literary novel  Almost A Love Story  (Epigram Books).

She is the inaugural recipient of the Georgette Chen Fellowship in recognition for her contributions to the creative programming in NUS College.

About the Book

Erin is a homemaker who hasn’t read a book in a long time. But that changes when Wendell—now a published author—returns after twelve years. Once, they shared a creative partnership: he wrote, she took notes, their closeness defined by the things they never said. But when Erin begins to read his novel—about a professor and his amanuensis—she sees shadows of herself on the page. The more she reads, the more the boundaries between fact and fiction blur. Conversations restart, old wounds reopen and the past reshapes the present in quiet, irreversible ways.

After twelve years abroad, acclaimed novelist Wendell An Ling returns home and reconnects with Erin, once his devoted amanuensis, now married, who has abandoned reading. Their reunion stirs memories of a creative partnership fraught with unspoken tensions, mirrored in Wendell’s latest novel about a professor and his note-taker. As Wendell and Erin navigate their tangled history, the lines between past and fiction blur, revealing a layered exploration of love, power and the fragile boundaries…