Lovelier, Lonelier - by Daryl Qilin Yam (Paperback)

About the Book

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.

Book Synopsis

"Casts a beguiling spell." -Rachel Heng, author of The Great Reclamation

Longlisted for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award

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?

Review Quotes

"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, author of The Great Reclamation

"Melancholic, peripatetic, flexuous." -Amanda Lee Koe, author of Delayed Rays of a Star

"Yam's writing is bewitching, and his narrative a web of parallel stories, but his themes are classic and familiar: loss, failure, ambiguity, and the meaning of love. With this sweeping group portrait, Daryl Qilin Yam suggests that love can at once be everything and not enough." -Rebecca Biagas, Necessary Fiction

"Yam's prose is fresh and contemplative-one that I'm excited to read again in the future." -Lee Jing-Jing, author of How We Disappeared

"A sensitive, assured piece of work with a strong sense of feeling at its centre." -Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti

"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, author of The Infinite Library and Other Stories

"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, artist