The Waiter - (Singularity) by Kwan Ann Tan (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

An interactive fiction debut where readers enter a world as an unnamed worker navigating a society on the brink of collapse.

In a future London, the rich hoard wealth and Waiters do the menial jobs no one else has time for. The city is being swallowed into the ground by "maws," gaping holes that appear and disappear without explanation--no one knows how or why they form, only that they seem to manifest wherever will cause the most chaos. Occasionally, a maw will leave behind a person: someone who wakes up without memories or any understanding of how they came to be swallowed up by the darkness.

You are one of them. As an unnamed Waiter, you must select your jobs carefully or risk losing work credits, while also trying to keep your humanity intact. Meanwhile, a desire to understand yourself creeps in: Who were you before this? Who might you become?

A bold and imaginative debut that allows readers to chart their own adventure, this book offers a world of possibilities, with eleven different endings and countless journeys toward them. A unique, voice-driven literary experience, The Waiter prompts readers to wrestle with agency and desire in a world that feels like it's coming apart at the seams.

Review Quotes

"A moving, elegant and wonderfully constructed book. Its many paths brush past the strange horrors at the center of the story and let you glimpse them from the corner of your eye, or push them to the back of your mind, as you make your choices and explore the edges of what's possible within this ominous and beautiful world."--Holly Gramazio, New York Times bestselling author of The Husbands

"Tense, futuristic fun...A garden of forking paths, filled with urban legends and forbidden pleasures, that's easy to enter and hard to escape."--Ed Park, author of Same Bed Different Dreams, Pulitzer Prize finalist for Fiction

"Brilliantly inventive and moving. I've not read anything like it before."--Soula Emmanuel, author of the Lambda Award-winning Wild Geese

About the Author

Kwan Ann Tan is originally from Malaysia but is currently based in London. Her work has previously been published in The Offing, Joyland Magazine, and Sine Theta Magazine. She won the 2023 Bournemouth Writing Prize and is an alumnus of the Tin House Winter Workshop.