Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan presents Sarong Party Girls, a brilliant and engaging novel—Emma set in modern Asia—about a young woman’s rise in the glitzy city of Singapore, where old traditions clash with modern materialism. Jazzy is a bombastic yet tenderly vulnerable gold-digger who reveals the contentious gender politics and class tensions thrumming beneath the shiny exterior of Singapore’s glamorous nightclubs and busy streets. Moving through Jazzy’s colorful, stratified world, she realizes she cannot ignore the troubling incongruity of new money and old-world attitudes which threaten to crush her dreams.Vividly told in Singlish— Singaporean English with its distinctive cadence and slang—Sarong Party Girls brilliantly captures the unique voice of this young, striving woman caught between worlds. With remarkable vibrancy and empathy, Cheryl Tan brings not only Jazzy, but the city of Singapore, to dazzling, dizzying life.
Born and raised in Singapore, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan is a New York–based journalist and author of A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family, and edited the fiction anthology Singapore Noir. She has been a staff writer at the Wall Street Journal, InStyle magazine, and the Baltimore Sun.
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