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  • Published: 15 August 2021
  • ISBN: 9789814954273
  • Imprint: PRH SEA
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 280
  • RRP: $24.99

The Ash House



A clairvoyant nun must uncover the secrets of an enigmatic pipa-playing spirit to save a haunted merchant family and their century-old ancestral home.

The Tjoa ash house originally intended for ancestral tablets has stood at the top of Kota Cahaya's exclusive Green Hill for a century. Now, it is all drooping lintels and sagging roof; a haunted house with a haunted heir in it-Arno Tjoa, a Barbie-doll fixated cripple whom Sister Mary Michael, the clairvoyant nun, has been sent to set free.

  • Published: 15 August 2021
  • ISBN: 9789814954273
  • Imprint: PRH SEA
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 280
  • RRP: $24.99

About the author

Audrey Chin

Audrey Chin is a Southeast Asian writer whose work explores the intersections between gender, faith and culture. Her essays, short stories, novels and contemplative verses have been published in Singapore, India, the UK and the US. She has been shortlisted thrice for the Singapore Literature Prize and is a Fellow of the 2017 International Writers Program in Iowa.

Praise for The Ash House

'In The Ash House, Audrey Chin weaves an intricate, startling matrix that does away with the gaps between the visible and invisible life forces influencing human choices. The story is a riveting and sensuous voyage into drama and duality, love and betrayal, dreams and delusions, family and belonging. Reader, prepare to be deliciously unsettled.'

YVONNE ADHIAMBO OWUOR, award winning author of The Dragonfly Sea, Dust and Weight of Whispers

The Ash House is everything I love about a gothic ghost story: intimate, familiar, yet deeply unsettling. I am so tempted to draw comparisons with Shirley Jackson, but Audrey Chin's novel is an inimitable beast of its own, seething behind some gorgeous imagery of post-colonial Southeast Asia. It is an enchanting whisper in the dark, a shadowy, sensuous call to revisit the demons that reside within the crevices of our ancestral memories.

SUFFIAN HAKIM, author of #1 Straits Times Bestseller Harris Potter and the Stoned Philosopher and The Minorities

'The Ash House is an elegant and original addition to the literature of subversion, alchemically blending the traditional Asian ghost story with the European gothic tradition. It's intelligent, politically aware, sexy and, above all, spooky. This is a book to be read with the lights on, and with a lot of free time because you won't be able to put it down.'

STEPHEN CARVER, author of Shark Alley: The Memoirs of a Penny-A-Liner