Advance praise for the book:
"By mirroring real-life architectural dreams with a fictional narrative, Clara Chow has produced an intriguing and original literary structure. Her somewhat dystopian world is a discomforting vision of a future where people struggle to adapt to societies very different from today, yet are still guided by a deep sense of their own humanity and their connection to each other.” —Meira Chand, author of A Different Sky "An inventive combination of non-fiction and fiction, with expertly crafted and unpredictable short stories. The exquisite and precise details in Clara Chow's stories bring to life the fantastical structures dreamt of by her interviewees.” —Dave Chua, author of Gone Case "We are accustomed to think of Singapore as a small island bound by a singular story. In Clara Chow’s genre-bending new book, it becomes a landscape of many dreams, in which architects’ fantasy projects provide a pretext for the revisions, reconstructions, and demolitions of counter-narratives.” —Professor Philip Holden, English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore, and author of Heaven Has Eyes "I don’t remember reading a cross-genre title like this, wonderfully traversing creative fiction, research and documentation without hitting a clunky, postmodernist note. Clara Chow’s agile blend of journalistic rigour and narrative empathy pays off handsomely. Rooted in reality and taking off into the heady realm of imagination, her stories are propelled by an urge to find a heart in the architecture of our lives, as characters navigate these dream structures, trying to find a human connection.” — Yeow Kai Chai, co-editor at Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and author of Pretend I'm Not Here. |