CY@CY Says Welcome to my dreamscape. Where a Lim is also a Ling.

It is 1993. Young and inexperienced Garda Cormac Reilly answers a call for help and  witnesses  a scene that will haunt him forever. Two silent, neglected children – fifteen-year-old Maude and five-year-old Jack – are waiting for him at a crumbling country house. Upstairs, their mother Hilaria Blake lies dead from an apparent drug overdose. Fast forward 20 years to 2013. Surgical resident ...

Set against the backdrop of a fictional island named Belport Island in Australia, The Wife and the Widow by Christian White is a thriller told from the perspectives of two women: Kate, a Melbourne widow, and Abby, an island local. The story begins with Kate and her daughter waiting at the airport for her husband John to return from London. But he isn’t on the plane at all. ...

I started reading Two Can Play by Kate Kessler without realising that it is the second book in the series.  Usually books in a crime series can stand alone without reading the earlier books, but Two Can Play makes quite a lot of reference to the first book It Takes One that I felt lost at times. You will enjoy ...

Repeat After Me by Rachel DeWoskin is a bittersweet cross-cultural tragic love story between two persons whose lives briefly intertwine but are changed forever. The story follows the relationship between Aysha Silvermintz, a young neurotic ESL teacher in Manhattan, and Da Ge, her student who is a Chinese dissident who comes to the U.S. just after the Tiananmen Square uprisings. Both Asyha and Da Ge come from ...

Set in modern China, February Flowers by Fan Wu is a coming of age story of two young women in a society torn between tradition and modernity, focusing on the bond between the two girls. Innocent seventeen-year-old Chen Ming and worldly and flashy twenty-four-year-old Miao Yan have very little in common other than studying at the same university. Ming lives in her own world ...

The Housekeeper and the Professor (博士の愛した数式) by Yoko Ogawa is a short read, mesmerising in its heart-warming story about unlikely friendships, mathematics and baseball. It has sold in excess of 4 million copies in Japan alone. This is a beautifully-written story about an old maths professor, his housekeeper and her young son. After a traffic accident in 1975, the professor’s memory post-1975 lasts only 80 minutes. ...

I have just finished reading The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin without knowing that this is a children’s book as the plot transcends all age-bracket genres.  I find it a bit humorous that at age 64, I am reading a book meant for children. On the other hand, I think children would need to be good in English to read ...

Wake In Fright by Kenneth Cook, first published in 1961, have achieved a cult status as the Australian answer to US and UK novels of 1960s youthful alienation. Though it is only 174 pages in length, it packs a powerful punch. It is the gruelling story of John Grant, a young  bonded schoolteacher on his way back from the remote township of Tiboonda in New ...

The Seventeen Second Miracle by Jason F. Wright is a heartwarming story about loss, tragedy, forgiveness, healing, love and the joy that comes when you reach out to make a difference in the life of another. Small kindnesses can lead to  life-changing miracles. Rex Connor learned on a summer afternoon in September 1970 that seventeen seconds can change a life forever when, ...

Over by Margaret Forster is a heartbreaking portrayal of how the death of a daughter causes a family to slowly implode. It is about love, grief, pain, loss and the corrosive effects of loss on human nature. Don and Louise’s eighteen-year-old daughter Miranda had drowned in a sailing accident but her body was never recovered.  Louise tries her best to move on to ...