In My Hands Today…

Death Wears a Beauty Mask and Other Stories – Mary Higgins Clark

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From Clark’s first-ever published story to classic tales featuring Alvirah and Willy, My Gal Sunday and many more, Death Wears a Beauty Mask and Other Stories gives readers the chance to revisit the short story highlights from the “Queen of Suspense.”

The jewel of this collection is the novella showcasing the dazzling and dangerous world of high fashion in 1970s New York City: Death Wears a Beauty Mask, which Mary began in 1974 and put aside to write Where Are the Children, the book that launched her career. Mary returned to Death Wears a Beauty Mask nearly forty years later and the result is spectacular.

Featuring the same chills and heart-pounding drama we’ve come to expect from a Mary Higgins Clark title, and including an exclusive author’s introduction, Death Wears a Beauty Mask and Other Stories is a spine-tingling read and glimpse into the evolution of the remarkable career of the “Queen of Suspense.”

In My Hands Today…

Death by Perfume – You Jin, translated by Jeremy Tiang

In the late 1970s, a young Singaporean writer arrives in Jeddah with an infant son. She encounters a strange and often hostile environment with curiosity, empathy and good humour.

In this collection of linked stories, the narrator confronts a bored expat wife with dangerously extravagant tastes, a divorced engineer with the face of a camel, and a desperate security guard who only finds solace in downing bottles of perfume. Beguiling, plaintive and profoundly insightful, You Jin’s fiction is a beautiful evocation of Saudi society.

In My Hands Today…

In the Country – Mia Alvar

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These nine globe-trotting, unforgettable stories from Mia Alvar, vividly give voice to the women and men of the Filipino diaspora. Here are exiles, emigrants, and wanderers uprooting their families from the Philippines to begin new lives in the Middle East, the United States, and elsewhere—and, sometimes, turning back again.

A pharmacist living in New York smuggles drugs to his ailing father in Manila, only to discover alarming truths about his family and his past. In Bahrain, a Filipina teacher drawn to a special pupil finds, to her surprise, that she is questioning her own marriage.

A college student leans on her brother, a labourer in Saudi Arabia, to support her writing ambitions, without realizing that his is the life truly made for fiction. And in the title story, a journalist and a nurse face an unspeakable trauma amidst the political turmoil of the Philippines in the 1970s and ’80s.

In My Hands Today…

Ministry of Moral Panic – Amanda Lee Koe

17238889Meet an over-the-hill Pop Yé-yé singer with a faulty heart, two conservative middle-aged women holding hands in the Galápagos, and the proprietor of a Laundromat with a penchant for Cantonese songs of heartbreak. Rehash national icons: the truth about racial riot fodder-girl Maria Hertogh living out her days as a chambermaid in Lake Tahoe, a mirage of the Merlion as a ladyboy working Orchard Towers, and a high-stakes fantasy starring the still-suave lead of the 1990s TV hit serial The Unbeatables.