` Remarkable... her characters glow with life & humour` Ian Mc Ewan 2003. Singapore. Friendless & fatherless, sixteen-year-old Szu lives in the shadow of her mother Amisa, once a beautiful actress & now a hack medium performing seances with her sister in a rusty house. When Szu meets the privileged, acid-tongued Circe, they develop an intense friendship which offers Szu an escape from her mother`s alarming solitariness, & Circe a step closer to the fascinating, unknowable Amisa. Seventeen years later, Circe is struggling through a divorce in fraught & ever-changing Singapore when a project comes up at work: a remake of the cult seventies horror film series ` Ponti`, the very project that defined Amisa`s short-lived film career. Suddenly Circe is knocked off balance: by memories of the two women she once knew, by guilt, & by a past that threatens her conscience... Told from the perspectives of all three women, Ponti by Sharlene Teo is an exquisite story of friendship & memory spanning decades. Infused with mythology & modernity, with the rich sticky heat of Singapore, it is at once an astounding portrayal of the gaping loneliness of teenagehood, & a vivid exploration of how tragedy can make monsters of us.