Synopsis
Corridor is a collection of short stories all set in present-day Singapore. With unsentimental clarity and heartbreaking honesty, Alfian Sa'at writes about HDB dwellers — students, housewives and factory workers, whose lives begin to unravel once they discover that happiness is a fragile thing in a country obsessed with progress and success.
The characters in each story find themselves in situations that offer them a ticket to hope and change: A video camera transforms the way a resentful daughter sees her widowed mother. A married couple receives free holiday tickets just when their luck seems to have run out. A girl encounters a transvestite on an MRT train ride who tells her that she looks like a famous singer. And a man enters a discotheque after a bitter divorce and re-learns the terror of falling in love all over again.
Rich in authentic detail, with a sensitive ear for the vernacular, Corridor paints an elegiac, revealing portrait of contemporary Singaporeans who exist along the city's corridors — haunted by lost loves, irrevocable childhoods, and a deep longing to be free.
Corridor won the Singapore Literature Prize Commendation Award in 1998.
About the author
Alfian Sa'at is a Singaporean writer, poet, and playwright. He published his first collection of poetry at the age of 21, and proceeded to win multiple awards for his works since then. Alfian is currently the resident playwright of Singaporean theatre group W!LD RICE.
About The Unicorn Library
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