✺ Lovelier, Lonelier

A NOVEL

SINGAPORE: EPIGRAM BOOKS, 2021

USA: GAUDY BOY, 2024

LONGLISTED / SINGAPORE NOMINEE FOR THE 2023 INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD

FINALIST FOR THE 2021 EPIGRAM BOOKS FICTION PRIZE

✺ SYNOPSIS

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.

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?

“Lovelier, Lonelier is a strong study of character and explores the emotional impact of love and loss in a narrative that spans multiple countries. The writing is self-assured in its ability to connect the various characters through a number of personal tragedies. The novel tackles meaningful themes such as the nature of reality, the role of chance, intergenerational trauma, and the power of art to redeem or destroy.”
— National Library Board of Singapore
“Lovelier, Lonelier is a reflection on inexplicable yet meaningful connections and disconnections, of how people or things can mysteriously come together, then even more enigmatically and unexpectedly drift apart.”
— Asian Review of Books
“Lovelier, Lonelier boldly resists categorisation... part of Yam’s charm, and the appeal of [the novel], is that it cannot be confined within familiar expectations of genre and style. To read Lovelier, Lonelier is to open your mind to reexamining the human condition and the function of literature itself, all through a woven net of bewitching storytelling. ”
— Necessary Fiction
“One of the best novels written by a Singaporean that I’ve ever read. A mesmerizing story about four friends brought together in Japan by a comet, it accesses the mysteries because it understands suffering. The plotting is intricate, the invention daring, the feeling delicate. I lived in its spell for days after putting down the book.”
— Jee Leong Koh
“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
“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
“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
“A sensitive, assured piece of work with a strong sense of feeling at its centre… An imaginative novel showing an appreciation for the mundane and the magical – by one of the most luminous and original stars of Singaporean fiction.”
— Sharlene Teo
“Yam’s prose is fresh and contemplative – one that I’m excited to read again in the future.”
— Lee Jing-Jing
“Daryl Qilin Yam’s Lovelier, Lonelier is a sophomore novel which avoids the slump altogether, and instead shoots off into the deep and unsettling corners of outer space, the human heart, and an alternate-dimensional Substation.”
— Tse Hao Guang

✺ IN CONVERSATION

To promote Gaudy Boy’s launch of Lovelier, Lonelier in the United States, I found myself at The Array – a private community library in Brooklyn, New York – in conversation with the award-winning author, playwright and translator Jeremy Tiang.

✺ TRAILER

In preparation for the below trailer by Epigram Books, I had to record myself answering five questions about my second novel.

1. What is the story about? Give some details of the character’s progress.

This book of mine follows the lives of four friends, and how a series of inexplicable events come to shape their lives, for better and for worse, turning into a source of joy and pain over two decades.

Without giving too much away, the book opens in the city of Kyoto in March, 1996: while people all over our planet ready themselves for the brilliant passing of Comet Hyakutake, also once known as the Great Comet of 1996, my characters become distracted instead by rumours that have begun proliferating around Kyoto describing rather implausible, rather fantastical happenings — happenings that no one can explain or come to terms with, bearing questions that can take an entire lifetime to answer.

2. What was the inspiration behind it?

So much of this book was borne out of the same concerns that shaped the way I came to terms with my own adulthood — with how I want to live my life. I was negotiating, for instance, the role and meaning that art and art-making had in my life; the way I define love, the way I fall in love, the way I choose to build and structure my personal life; the very tragic and invisible ways we allow pain to determine the course of our lives, our feelings of contentment, our lonelinesses. I was thinking a lot about suffering, especially the cyclical nature of our suffering, as well as the way in which personal history can intersect so serendipitously with a larger history, a history that can encompass all these times and places so much greater than ourselves.

3. What were some of the challenges in writing this?

The biggest challenge I faced in writing this novel was actually failing to anticipate how big this book needed to be. I found myself continually wrestling against my need for restraint with the responsibility I felt I had towards these characters of mine, who steadily grew fuller and richer to me the longer they resided within my mind.

Another big challenge also lay in determining the exact flow of the plot, in arranging all of the many years, places and situations of the story in a way that remained dynamic, entertaining, footloose. While the book is set across moments of reckoning located in Japan, in Spain, in Malaysia and in Singapore, the book also skips across time in a way that I believe will take many of my readers on quite a ride.

4. Do you have any favourite books or authors that have influenced your writing? Tell us who/what they are and how they’ve impacted your writing career/life.

I credit the writing of this book with two formative novels I read when I was a teenager. The first was Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, a book that taught me so much about the art of storytelling and how the practice of writing needs to reckon with its own duties, its burdens, its responsibilities. Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha also shaped the way I have come to accept the oftentimes cruel comings and goings of life, especially when it comes to friendship and companionship, and what it means to truly heal and detach oneself from loss and heartbreak — to live life in search of meaning and beauty while remaining welded to its pain.

5. What are some of your hopes for this book?

My hope is that readers take to the book with as much passion and ardour as I had in the making of it — that they feel they can’t put it down, can’t let go of it, not till the very end. 

When I think of the book I find myself imagining a comet, really: a streak of light making its arc across a vast expanse, before it returns once more to its point of origin. That, at the very least, was how it appeared in my mind, and I really hope that some of that feeling comes across on every line, every scene, every turn of the page.

✺ MEDIA