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Lindsay has always known Singapore for its food, skyscrapers, and smart people. And now she knows a secret that could upend her world.
Lindsay Trapp, a promising scientist from Iowa, finds herself friendless after five lonely months in Singapore. Stuck living with her landlady’s dysfunctional family, she loses hope for happiness. Then, along comes a psychic who offers Lindsay her friendship, plus a love potion she claims cannot fail. Before long, a man of incredible fame and charm swoops into Lindsay’s life. It’s an improbable romance, yet magically perfect.
But the psychic friend has a secret Lindsay has promised to keep. A secret that could wreak tragedy in the landlady’s family. Lindsay is faced with an impossible choice: expose her friend and save the people she lives with, or bury the secret and keep her lover. My Friend from Raffles City is a heart-stirring page-turner, where a woman’s quest for happiness turns into a gamble with love.
My Friend from Raffles City is a 2024 IPPY medalist in the category of multicultural fiction.
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An old apartment building in Singapore is about to be demolished. But twenty-eight-year-old Jie-Li and her parents can’t afford a new place. When her job as a nurse becomes increasingly difficult, Jie-Li fears she can no longer support her ailing parents.
Thankfully, Mr. Kwok, a former neighbor, appears, offering Jie-Li good money to retrieve a family treasure he had left behind. Jie-Li charms her way into the apartment next door, where an American artist now lives, a naïve young man who aspires to travel the world. But as Jie-Li spends time in the apartment, repressed childhood memories of her painting pictures with Mr. Kwok begin to surface, forcing her to lose sight of her quest to save her family.
Little does she know that retrieving the lost treasure brings up the mind-blowing truth about her early years, the truth that may scar her for the rest of her life.
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work in progress
Thirty-seven-year-old Natalie Hassell can’t look at electronic screens—not without getting severely ill. As a night custodian at a university in Iowa, she keeps a quiet, frugal life. Unencumbered by her disability, she expresses her creative imagination by building dollhouses using discarded materials. She pores over books in the library, dreaming of exploring quaint historical buildings in faraway places.
One day, a fluke misunderstanding in the dark basement leads her to a well-dressed, homeless graduate student from Singapore. Uncanny parallels between their lives quickly lead her to identify him as her one and only true love, her ultimate life partner. Little does she know that the inexplicable bond between them would force her to question everything she has ever believed and push her to go places she would never have dared.