“★★★★ In this vibrant panorama of queer interior life, Be Your Own Bae marks a new maturity for gay fiction in Singapore… These flashing and flickering stories have staying power.”

“Yam [weaves] together a cycle of short stories that echo and resonate into more than the sum of their parts… [a] vital addition to the body of literature coming out of Singapore.”

“Daryl Qilin Yam masterfully traces quiet heartbreaks, unseen intimacies and urgent longings—the moments of inner epiphany that change everything. Be Your Own Bae is an expansive collection of stories charged with the pulse of the millennial generation. It is as brave and electrifying as a hand held open in the dark to the possibility of touch. It will arrest your heart.”

“Be Your Own Bae is an intimate portrayal of connections formed between friends, lovers and strangers, and the stories we tell in order to find meaning. Reminiscent of Rachel Cusk’s Outline Trilogy but distinct in its observations of millennial life in Singapore, reading BYOB is like eavesdropping on the conversations of strangers and coming away with a richer understanding of ourselves.”

“The short story is my favourite place to meet [Daryl’s] voice... A reprieve in a city founded on panic, outrage and imagined lack, this book about well-travelled protagonists staggering into the bliss of love, before slipping back out again, is more than an affectionate reminder of the beauty and breathlessness of all our intangible connections.”

“There’s no better writer than Daryl Qilin Yam to make you feel feelings that don’t even have names… I finished this collection of loosely-intertwined stories within 24 hours of turning the first page. [...] Every line is poetry, man.”

“Daryl’s stories are a paradox. Breathtakingly experimental in form, but refusing melodrama and flourish, they’re like finely crafted bulbs of clear glass, capturing a queer-inclusive transnational Asian everyday with all their tensions and heartbreaks.”

“Yam’s liquid prose carries us, dreamlike, through these stories. We flow through them and somehow, they flow through us as well. The physical places his characters inhabit are as vivid as the rich inner worlds that they navigate. Their conversations sparkle with words spoken, words unspoken and words unspeakable.”